#rto

While Starlink is pushing the industry forward and Wall Street is raising concerns about what that could mean for AT&T, we’re still consumed by RTO, presence reports, and building a new headquarters. That’s the only focus here and it feels completely backwards.

Instead of talking about how we’re going to compete with Starlink, people are talking about badge swipes and making sure they sit in a chair for eight hours before heading home. Time that many employees once spent working extra is now spent commuting. The result is 8&skate culture where people check the box, do their eight hours, and leave. That’s not how you build an innovative company, but that’s the culture Stink has created with RTO, FTW, and Presence monitoring.

At the same time, we’re spending billions on a new headquarters nobody wants while facing one of the biggest competitive threats the company has ever seen. Shouldn’t the priority be improving our competitive position, controlling costs, and attracting and retaining the talent needed to compete?

The conversation should be about how we beat new competitors, not how many days people are in what office. If leadership wants this company to be successful, the priorities have to change. Right now, it feels like we’re looking inward while the competition is looking forward.

Time is running out, and if things don’t shift soon there won’t be an AT&T left for these egos to lord over.

There has been no mention about RTO for mortgage. In fact, in NJ, PA and parts of NY, the closest hub is NYC which is way outside of the 30 miles everyone is talking about. Any word on this?

It’s been almost a month since we were required to return to the office in the name of "collaboration," and all I have seen is people including leaders finding different ways to minimize their time in the office.
Leaders have families to take care of too, so many leave after just a few hours because they need to pick up their kids from camp or school. It’s a reminder that everyone is balancing work with personal responsibilities.
Meanwhile, I haven’t seen any meaningful increase in collaboration. What I have seen is hours lost commuting, searching for parking, walking to and from the office, and dealing with all the extra logistics. It feels like a significant waste of time and energy that could have been spent doing actual work.

I’m a remote tm in properties and I’m curious if there’s been any RTO coming that would impact me

JVB demoted because she couldn’t meet target in MM sales. Now Shelly Goodman ‘retiring’ because she couldn’t unravel the destruction JVB left behind. For those of you outside of sales that complain about RTO, sales has the most valid reason to complain. Sales is forced to office 5x just like everyone else. Think of the time on the road we could be in front of customers. Instead, we have to come to office daily to meet an in office badge swipe quota while sales attainments circle the drain. We can go into the field to meet customers and try to sale fiber and mobility but the hours we lose daily by commuting instead of acquiring revenue is astounding. Yes, we are in the field but the hours commuting eats up some of that time and we see it in quarter after quarter revenue decline. When sales is set up to fail, we all will.

Is that officially happening?

After the JR staff meeting today, I am more worried for my job than ever. It’s not about just RTO anymore or that they’re outsourcing a lot of positions. I got the strong impression that RMC ( and other business lines likely) will have designated hubs. If you’re not in one of those hubs, you are in danger. As someone in a very small hub with minimal RMC presence, this is hugely concerning!

JR didn’t say this directly but reading between the lines of what she did say, this is not a stretch. Clearly leadership wants to move away from geographically distributed teams entirely ( unless it’s collaborating with your co-workers in India or Poland, then it’s totally ok).

If you’re remote or in a hub where your business line doesn’t have much presence, it feels like you will be on the chopping block first.

It sounds like their main goal ( even though it’s so outdated and ridiculous) is to move everyone to the hubs they want them in.

She even mentioned how other banks only have a couple hubs not 22 and we all know that US Bank is now a follower so that’s the direction they will move in.

Current policy for the location is 2 day WFH. Berkeley Heights location is currently parking infrastructure limited to house all ppl in the office everyday.

Do you guys think the RTO office will be enforced on berkeley heights as well?

I was hired during pandemic and never been to office. Whats the dress code here? Business Casual or Strictly business formal??

RTO is working!! Way to go, John. You’re an absolute genius!! TDPs and real talent leaving at the most alarming clip in history, and all that’s left are the soon to be retirees. My, what great policy you have! Who wouldn’t want to work at a concentration camp like this?

Just retire already, you su-k, worthless POS.

I know of no one that has ever been written up or chastised for not coming to the office though. If you are an individual contributor you did your job fine during COVID and there is virtually no reason for you to come into the office anymore. I mean the office is louder, more chaotic, food is as expensive as anywhere else. People are more likely to stand around and socialize than do actual work. The commute time of the individual gets baked into the work day more often than not because they only have so many hours before they need to take care of the household. It is abhorrently inefficient. To top it all off very few teams are fully located in one office. So you are effectively coming in to simply jump on conference calls with teams from all over the world literally. I can understand a once a week requirement just because we are social animals and there is genuine need for socialization with one another. Outside of once a week though it is strictly suboptimal working conditions. Also just imagine the savings if VZ truly sold off all its offices and cancelled all leases.

Perfectly stated, @jb+1kv47wr3d.

For me, the biggest issue is that RTO is basically a pay cut in disguise. Between gas and all the other extra expenses, it adds up fast. If they gave us a pay raise that covered those costs, I honestly wouldn't mind it nearly as much as I do now.

I quit a few years ago because of RTO. All of my colleagues were around the world and it did not make sense for me to have to go into an office. I fought it, they wouldn't budge, and I lost all respect for this company. Thankfully I found a better job pretty quickly. All of those same colleagues are also not with TR any longer, because of RTO and lack of pay raises. Now I see that they're trying to fill my old role as remote, after not being able to fill it as hybrid for years (yes I've been keeping an eye on it). It's satisfying to see, but I'm still irked that they dug their heels in this long. Maybe it's a good thing that they're finally wavering but I wouldn't trust this company to make any common sense decisions ever again.

Taking all PTO together this year but it’s not enough for my needs. I need an extra week or two - manager says they can permit remote work if it’s a short duration but with RTO 5x from Sep 1, I’m worried 😟 This is for North America.

Will HR & Global Mobility need to get involved? Any recent success stories of folks who have navigated this?

Feeling grateful to be part of such a successful company! Maybe the RTO policy has effectively separated the wheat from the chaff.

Is there going to be a change with the full time 5 days in office policy or not what is with the constant decision making delay and teasing about changes. Absurd policy.

Mine was wrong by 1 day. Who knows why

Since it hasn’t been asked yet this month and we’re already 1/2 day into July, when will the tracking report data be available for May. :)

Why four days? Simply put, four is twice as many as two.

As a result, employees should expect approximately twice the collaboration, twice the innovation, and, where practical, twice the culture.

While these projections have not yet been validated, they remain directionally encouraging.

The Value of Presence

Research consistently demonstrates that employees working in close physical proximity are more likely to:

• Ask if anyone has seen the conference room adapter.
- Spend fifteen minutes determining whose turn it is to reboot the meeting-room computer.
- Participate in spontaneous conversations that begin with, "Quick question..." and conclude forty-three minutes later.

These are the kinds of high-value interactions that cannot be replicated through purpose-built collaboration software specifically designed to replicate them.

Visibility Matters

Although employee evaluations will continue to be based entirely on performance and results, it is important that those results occur where they can be observed.

This allows leadership to appreciate the effort that accompanies the work, such as walking briskly between conference rooms while carrying a laptop.

Building Culture

Many employees have indicated that they already feel connected to their teams.
This is encouraging, but incomplete.

Organizational culture is strengthened through shared experiences, including:

• Searching multiple floors for an available meeting room.
- Listening to someone else's conference call while attending your own.
- Discovering at 11:58 a.m. that everyone had the same idea for lunch.

These experiences build institutional knowledge that is difficult to quantify, which is fortunate.

Addressing Productivity

Some employees have expressed concern that additional commuting time may reduce the number of hours available for focused work.

Leadership recognizes this possibility.

To offset the impact, employees are encouraged to become more efficient.

Frequently Asked Question
Q: If my team is distributed across three states and we still meet on video calls, why am I commuting?
A: While your meetings may still occur virtually, it is important that they occur virtually from the office.

This reinforces our shared commitment to flexibility

Ahh yes, let the silence and content cover you like a warm blanket. Not much chatter about folks not going into the office.... Not much chatter about anything really.
When its this quiet, you should be worried.
Cuts are coming.
A rather large wave of cuts....

Lets see whats going on-
Offshore contractors are currently being hired as FTEs, under the guise of "contractor reduction"
OCC results are being scanned and loaded into AI to begin automating controls and workload
The ServiceNow "OOB" deployment is heavily oriented towards AI
We have hundreds of FirstBank employees waiting for group assignments
Lots of tech issues occurring simultaneously and more frequently.
Q2 Pulse survey results are non-existent.
RTO 5 across the board is seemingly NOT across the board. 4000+ people still WFH in PA

With all this going on, and nothing being said, its indicative of a high level decision currently underway.

What's the latest ?

It's been 1 month since ELT decided this was the most effective way to make us quit. How is everyone doing with it so far? I can't help but wonder how much more $ we spend to keep these buildings full of bodies vs have them empty? The energy costs alone make me scratch my head. The whole thing seems so backwards and short sighted. It would almost be like discovering electricity, then the government taking it away because it 'feels' that people did better without it, while showing no actual data. Just "trust me bro" talking points. Or air conditioning, the greatest thing ever for st louis and tempe. Imagine having that and then it being taken away because a handful of low iq malicious government officials wanted people to move out of their city. A demonic calculated move is what that would be chalked up as. That is what RTO feels like. A tech advancement that was shown to work for the whole firm for almost 4 years (any way longer for many HO associates), but got taken away with zero offset for compensation. For you slow learners on here who think being in a cube for 4 days is great, how would you feel if your pay was cut 15%? You would suddenly be singing a different tune wouldn't ya? You might hate HBAs and remote work, but for many of us, it was a major perk/benefit and reason for staying here. Now it is gone and after 30 days of this cr-p I see absolutely zero + impact. In fact, it almost seems like productivity is moving the opposite direction. 2 days max in office will get you all the in person "collaboration" one needs. If you want more, come in and enjoy your toxic dystopian sh!thole. Why do office junkies care so much where other people do their jobs at if at the end of the day the same work is getting done? HBAs dont care how many people fill up the cubes or who clocks in a what time. Seems like only the micro managing doofuses of ELT and GPs care about such a stupid concept.

Does anyone have any information on the expanded RTO plan for Optum for the remainder of 2026? I know there will be more layoffs and more jobs pushed into offices, but are there additional cities or states being targeted for RTO?

For those doing RTO, how many days do you actually go into the office? I’m guessing it’s less than 4 days per week.

Any updates on if they are expanding the RTO radius for MN and DC?

https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/fortune-500-bosses-demanding-staff-070000467.html

I see RTO and market based culture really paid off.

On track for back below $20.

Guess Wall-Street isn’t responding as positively to endless layoffs and treating employees like sh-t as they were before.

🤡

Are you still employed at the bank? What happened to you?

Serious answers only

Enforcement ratcheting up?

Last year, MC and executive leadership pulled the rug out from under remote employees on extraordinary ratings and promotions: line and middle management got the news in late October, all employees in November. Only those classified as hybrid or on-site were eligible (which turned out to be largely a dud anyway), while remote staff were punished with a geo-code demotion that completely ignored cost of living. Hundreds, if not thousands, of employees who put in ten months of hard work were denied both monetary and career growth, severely degrading morale across the company.

Given that the CEO, MC, and execs are clearly pursuing a strategy of squeezing employees into voluntarily quitting (via the GCC build-out and other tactics), the question now is: has anyone heard anything about what's landing in Q4? Trying to avoid ... Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

The hr requirement is 50% for in office time. I’ve seen the policy in writing.

I’m so sick of managers lying about HR saying how terrible they are. I honestly think managers bonuses are tied to the in office attendance.

Just got a RTO related email outlining ground rules which included packing up all of your stuff if you plan to be in meetings for an extended period of time. It's bad enough not to have a permanent desk, but being expected to vacate a desk during the business day is beyond ridiculous. If you want me in the office, I need an actual space to work.

Wasting 3-4 hours in car - just to tap badge , login logoff again on the meetings - really its counterproductive - makes NO sense in the year 2026...Well I get it Gunjan comes from old school industrial manufacturing background - This is really damage the bank on the long term - meaning less RTO ...Really

Is anyone else going extra days just to add a buffer in case tracking is wrong?

Where's "RTO is industry standard" guy? Probably carpooling with the "see you on the commute" guy. I'm sure that's a great conversation between the two.

Should we keep touting how much we make data-informed decisions around here? 8 and skate brah.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/more-people-worked-from-home-in-2025-despite-rto-mandates?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy

More US employees worked from home in 2025 than the year prior, a small but notable shift that suggests companies’ years-long efforts to get workers back into the office have hit a wall.

Last year, 34.9% — or 32.5 million — of full-time workers did at least part of their job at home on the average day, according to the latest American Time Use Survey published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Thursday. That’s up from 33.4% in 2024.

CEOs across industries have demanded employees return to the office, trying to reverse a shift toward remote work that picked up during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the BLS data released today add to growing evidence that the pandemic-era paradigm shift is here to stay; the share of workers who work at home at least some of their day remains more than 10 percentage points higher than in 2019.

I’ve been hearing rumors about a 3 days in-office requirement, with Mondays and Fridays remote. Any truth to that?

Fiserv has an opportunity to modernize how it thinks about work, productivity, and employee accountability.

The return-to-office model is being sold as “collaboration,” but for many employees, the actual workday does not support that claim. A large amount of the work still happens through Teams calls, emails, shared documents, workflow systems, and digital handoffs with colleagues, subject matter experts, developers, reviewers, and leaders who are spread across different states and locations.

That is not true in-person collaboration. That is remote work being performed from an office cubicle.

The issue is not whether employees should be accountable. They absolutely should be. The issue is whether physical presence is being mistaken for productivity.

Fiserv is a technology and financial services company. If the company wants to lead in innovation, artificial intelligence, automation, client service, and operational excellence, then it should manage employees by measurable outcomes, not outdated assumptions about “butts in seats.”

A better model would be simple:

Set clear productivity benchmarks.Set clear quality expectations.Set clear deadlines.Track cycle time, accuracy, responsiveness, client impact, rework, missed handoffs, stakeholder satisfaction, and risk reduction.Hold underperformers accountable.Reward employees who produce excellent work.Require office presence only when there is a legitimate business reason for people to be physically together.

That is a more mature operating model than blanket attendance rules.

Many employees were more willing to give extra time and discretionary effort when working from home because commuting was not draining hours and energy out of the day. When people are forced to commute to an office just to sit on virtual meetings with people in other locations, they become more protective of their time. That is not a lack of commitment. That is a rational response to an inefficient work design.

The company should ask itself a direct question:

What business outcome improves when an employee drives to an office, sits at a desk, and collaborates with remote colleagues through the same digital tools they would have used from home?

If there is a real answer, define it. Measure it. Apply it only where it makes sense.

But if the answer is vague language about culture, collaboration, or visibility, then the policy is not really about productivity. It is about control, optics, and habit.

Fiserv should not confuse visibility with value.

The future of work should not be built around where a person is sitting. It should be built around what they produce, how well they produce it, how reliably they deliver, and how much value they create for clients, teams, and shareholders.

The new CEO has a chance to reset this conversation. Not by eliminating accountability, but by making accountability smarter.

Measure the work.Measure the quality.Measure the outcomes.Measure the impact.

Then let high-performing employees do their jobs in the environment where they produce the best results, within legal, ethical, client, security, and compliance requirements.

That would be a real innovation culture.

They moved people out of real estate to WFH to get the real estate off the books end of 2nd quarter. Not because there has been a change of heart for RTO. Confirmed, a large WFH group. Shift bid completed early June NOT fully released. Company seems to be releasing 2 - 3 weeks of schedule. Normally, they would release about 3 month. This not an indicator of restructuring. #WFH #AT&T #AT&TLayoffs

RTO is absolutely driving me crazy. I'd quit tomorrow if I could afford it, but since I can't now I just keep hoping they lay me off.

The biggest difference between the two companies isn’t technology. It isn’t strategy. It’s leadership and culture.

At SpaceX, employees are working toward a clear mission. People know the goal, understand the direction, and believe they’re building something important. Here, the only mission we’re working on is RTO and presence reports.

At AT&T, many employees increasingly feel like they’re being blamed for problems they didn’t create.

One of the most common traits of failing leadership is scapegoating. When results disappoint, instead of asking whether the strategy is wrong, leaders look for someone else to blame. Employees become the problem. Feedback becomes the problem. Dissent becomes the problem.

That’s why the 8/1/25 email struck such a nerve and why everyone here is checked out. His message to the employee base was “You don’t matter”.

When employees raised concerns about morale, flexibility, retention, and RTO, the response wasn’t introspection. Employees were told “loyalty is dead” there “might be a disconnect between you and your current professional choice.” Concerns were dismissed as “more outliers than we’d like.”

Many employees read that and saw a leader more interested in defending their bad decision than understanding why so many people opposed it.

Another hallmark of poor leadership is rigidity. Strong leaders adapt when the facts change. Weak leaders treat every challenge to their strategy as a challenge to their authority and it damages their ego. They double down, no matter how much evidence piles up around them that they made a mistake.

Then comes the most dangerous stage, isolation.

Because of the fear of retaliation for pushing back or telling the truth, leaders stop hearing bad news. Dissent gets dismissed. Feedback gets filtered. Executives surround themselves with people who tell them what they want to hear instead of what they need to hear. “Yes men”

A bubble forms, and Inside the bubble, everything is working.

Outside the bubble, morale is collapsing, talent is leaving, recruiting is harder, and competitors are pulling further ahead.

Employees aren’t asking for miracles. They’re asking for basic respect and leadership that listens, adapts, and accepts responsibility when something isn’t working.

Instead, many feel they’re being asked to sacrifice more, commute more, give up flexibility, and then accept blame when the outcomes don’t improve.

The most dangerous thing a CEO can do is become so convinced of his own correctness that he stops hearing what everyone else is telling him.

That’s the disconnect employees have been talking about all along and why another company will soon pass us by.