CRE is drastically reducing our portfolio of buildings across the 21-state footprint. The few buildings not for sale or being leased back are being set up with drop in space. It’s obvious the company plans to continue reducing headcount otherwise they’d be holding onto more office space and setting up permanent cubicle/office space for employees. As leadership begins looking at the potential 2020 budget the number one agenda is cut expense. When this is all over and the dust settles how many buildings and employees will T have? Lots of people are upset over being relocated and forced to use drop in space. What if it’s all just a temporary solution until property and head count can be reduced to an acceptable number? At the same time T is supposedly looking to sell sports channels and or DirecTV while all fiber builds have been reduced to almost nothing in 2019/2020. Is this the 2020 vision we’ve heard about for several years. Don’t you think it’s odd they stopped talking about pivot skills and pushing Nano Degrees? It will be interesting to see the employee headcount reported by T after 1st quarter 2020. I believe T reported around 270K employees in 2018... could that be reduced by 20%, 30%-40% or more?
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Selling buildings is the ONLY hard cash revenue at the moment for ATT.
It will stop when they will reach the "magical" number of people, with the "right" mix, and in the "desired" location.
This will NOT stop in 2020. Don't delude yourselves.
Collaboration work areas are a joke. What a despicable waste on all levels. Perfect for creating an unproductive work environment and make your remaining employees less productive, unhappy, less loyal, and less likely to recommend AT&T's services and as a place to work. The recent employee survey had a ridiculous company response for how you can improve/increase the survey scores going forward (i.e., "Learn to appreciate your job...", instead of the company responding how it listened and will make its own improvements in response to the survey. They can't even respond to a survey correctly.
I left ATT earlier this year, basically out of total burnout from the schizophrenia of the company.
My (former) group was also pushed to “automate” processes beginning last year. Problem is... there was no budget provided for training on the various products/software they wanted us to use.
This year we made more headway in “automating”, before I left. However... it’s become increasingly clear that you’ve got to have at least one or two knowledgeable humans keeping an eye on the “automated” reporting. A lot of our systems were overwhelmed at times, would crash overnight, or worst of all, provide incomplete data. And of course, the people who run these source data systems are far away and less than responsive.
Part of the reason I left is trying to get the data to go my job became too complex. I could do the work, but I couldn’t do my work without reliable data.
I fear the company has gotten too big to manage.
@1vpi Kindly remove your head from your rectum. While I happen to agree with you that the company has every right to change the work arrangement, and tell folks they need to start reporting to an office daily...the manner in which they are rolling the mandate out makes absolutely no sense and there is no logic applied to who should report where. If my employer requests that I to start reporting to an office daily to work, is it unreasonable for me to expect that there should be a place for me to sit and plug in a laptop? Also does it make any sense for me to drive to a T office location 100 miles away where none of my peers are located (that has no space, mind you)...when I could sit in a T office location 10 miles away where none of my peers are also located, and oh by the way, has dedicated space I can use? How does that make any sense? It doesn’t. That’s the stuff people are genuinely torqued off about.
@1ycu – Ding Ding! "Yet, ATO folks are forced back into the office, some with no place to sit. "
I know (actually it amazes me) how many people on here don't know about what is going on in ATO currently. A sweeping decision to bring everyone back into an office 5 days a week. Very few if any exceptions granted, mainly only for medical reasons that must be documented and vetted.
And not any office, mind you, but one you are assigned based on basically nothing else but the size of the office. It matters not that there is no one in your immediate or even extended workgroup there. They don't want to hear about that; it is dismissed. If they want everyone to come back into the office, that's their prerogative. They are in charge and can change your deal at their fancy. They can mandate that you commute, passing perfectly fine AT&T space along the way, where maybe there is no one in your workgroup, but plenty of room and empty cubes....or even better, leave your current full time office, where you have your own space but there is no one in your workgroup,..to a location 100 miles away in an office that is being downsized and there is no room for the people already there, let alone the people they're sending there over the next year.
And no one is able to articulate how this makes any sense at all from a business perspective, or indeed even how it will be able to work.
And we are hearing about how CRE leadership is feuding with ATO leadership over the whole mess. CRE leadership working in the exact opposite direction; selling and downsizing all real estate. ATO leadership; sending everyone back into those offices. Great "collaboration" leadership; really, very well thought out. Give yourself a little something extra in March.
And if you watch any of the Town Halls, leadership seems genuinely confused why the eNPS results were so bad, and why the comments specifically seemed to question leadership decision making and a disconnect between L2, L3 managers and leadership.
The MT building has hundreds of empty offices. There are employees with offices who haven't been there in 3 years. Millions of dollars of office supplies & furniture collecting dust. Yet, ATO folks are forced back into the office, some with no place to sit. Wasted money on the part of T, consolidate the folks or let everyone go back to WFH! Wasted time commuting, the cost of commuting and adding more cars to an already crowded state is the worst idea ever. There is no "collaboration" at all, just unhappy workers.
So what’s new? AT&T has been selling buildings and leasing back space the past decade ie almost all our towers sold to Crown Towers and leased back space, many corporate offices.
They’ve said we’re not in the real estate business.
Perhaps sale-leaseback is to raise cash to pay down debt.
Capital leases do create debt on the balance sheet, but that is a different animal from debt securities held by the public.
Randall had a town hall meeting a while back. He boldly stated he could run the company with 1/3 (one third) the current work force. Expect to be laid off.
As far as CRE is concerned, they are already making regulatory entries in OREMIS and I have yet to receive an explanation why they are doing this when it is part of my job assignment.
We will ALL be outsourced by contractors and temp agencies. PRODUCTS WITHOUT OVERHEAD IS THE WAVE OF THE FUTURE. (There’s an app for that will be your replacement).
They also need less building here when they are offshoring jobs. Automation costs money. Offshoring doesn't.
Truth it’s like they are playing musical chairs with employees. Hire new people piss off the people already there get rid of new people get rid of old people and see what they end up with and if they don’t like it just do it all over again. What joke for management.
AT&T wants to cut 80,000 people in 2019. Last count they were up to 23,000.
I can tell you from personal experience, our team got a new manager that set out immediately to automate our work and use contract labor to complete projects. Leadership cut our budget by an almost laughable percentage. To their dismay our team is actually needed, we have to pay the bills and efforts to automate everything simply doesn’t work. You can see the disappointment and stress as they try and fail to eliminate our team. It’s exhausting to say the least. The sad thing is our team has a huge impact on the budget, works incredibly hard for the company and continues to support numerous workgroups.
Automation is allowing the company to reduce headcount. Yes there are some issues here and there but nothing that stops the boat.
From what I’ve seen in management it has been maybe 10-20% average across the company plus an even larger number of union employees recently impacted. I guess it’s conceivable that the company could cut 20% or more in 2019. That would be over 50,000 employees in a year, seems like awfully big number when you see it but who knows. If cuts continue through 4th qtr 2019 & 1st qtr 2020 with additional people retiring or looking for another job out of fear or frustration it might very well be that high of number.