#rto

After more strict changes for RTO (Thrive Together initiative) It seems remote people are being targeted more than office people in RTP and NANE locales, anyone else seeing that?

Are there any changes to 5 days?

The Covid hired managers (not talking about race, just those who can’t keep up and were obnoxious while they had the Covid protections) have been so stressed in the office.

It’s been too long for them to still be stressed from the RTO announcement. Anyone know what management has going on?

Stop telling me what you watched on Netflix last night.

I don't care what you watched on Netflix last night. I don't care that you're behind on Severance. I don't care that you're rewatching The Wire. I don't care that your wife made you watch The Bear and now you both have opinions about it.

I am at my hot desk. I have headphones on the desk in front of me and on my head. My calendar has a red block on it that says "deep work." My Slack status is the little do-not-disturb moon icon.

This is not subtle.

I worked from home for four years. I had three real conversations a day, all of them with people on my team about work things. I have been back in the office for nine weeks and last week alone I was told about a podcast, a documentary, two restaurants in the financial district that "everyone is talking about," and a guys daughter's recital. I do not know this guy's daughter. I do not know this guy.

Stop coming up to my desk. Stop hovering near my desk. Stop sliding into the hot desk next to me when there are eleven open ones on the other side of the floor.

The office is for the people who don't have anything to do. I have things to do.

Company has joined other major corporations in implementing a mandatory 5-day return-to-office (RTO) policy, which some view as a strategy to encourage voluntary attrition essentially a "soft layoff”.

Recent reports suggest that the number of employees choosing to leave following this mandate has been lower than expected, leading the company to evaluate additional measures for workforce reduction. These potential "other options" may include involuntary separations, employee engagement responses, or "hard layoffs." While the company continues to monitor office attendance as part of performance reviews, there are currently no specific details on which business units will be impacted or the exact timing of further restructuring.

#RTO #Workplace #Career #CorporateLife #MandatoryRTO #CompanyCulture #QuietFiring #SoftLayoffs #EmployeeEngagement #WorkLifeBalance

Many of us who have been around for a minute remember how universally Tipsord wasn’t liked. Dude had the bedside manner of Dr House.

But many us held out hope that Farney would take us back to the old State Farm. The one Ed led. Farney is trying to make some legacy of AI and bad faith. With RICO charges pending in Oklahoma, a Congressional DOJ investigation led by Senator Hawley, and the botched California handling - how is our company worth what it is? You can’t get promoted unless you drink the kool-aid and now they expect if you live within 180 miles of the HUBs you can commute. The new hybrid is trash but dang imagine living in Tucson AZ and having to commute to Phoenix

This isn’t working. RTO isn’t working.

The conversation internally is still focused only on badge swipes, presence reports, five-day mandates and 10% sweeping layoffs while the stock slides, morale stays low, and leadership takes new debt and pushes expensive long-term office bets nobody wants.

Markets don’t care about the unnecessary and expensive RTO facade. It just destroys value by forcing out top talent and plummeting productivity.

They don’t care about micromanaging badge data.
They don’t care about forced commutes that reduce available working hours.
They don’t care who sat in a chair 5 days this week while watching Netflix at their desk.

They care about execution. Growth. Costs. Talent retention. Confidence in leadership. All the things we aren’t focused on right now.

At some point the board has to ask hard questions and decide to make some real changes to turn things around.

Because the falling stock price, disengaged employees, and doubling down on unpopular policies isn’t a strategy. It’s self inflicted destruction.

My top 10

It increases commute time & stress. Period...
It raises costs for emplyees...
It can reduce worklife balance.
It limits access to wider talent pools.
It hurts productivity for focused work.
It creates unnecessary office overhead.
It can lower employee satisfaction.
It makes caregiving harder.
It can increase burnout risk.
It is not improving collaboration.

“All managers are mandated to be in the office logged into the LAN 11 hours per day or they will be terminated.”

We can’t make this place rules up!

Very odd it’s not in May, think they’re cooking the books with the layoffs to make the numbers look good? New CEO announcement? New RTO policy?

Amid the whole RTO mess and morale being as low as I can remember, we are named one of the best companies for culture in the country. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad. We're 19th, in case you were wondering.

https://www.forbes.com/lists/employers-culture/

Crime-ridden Pittsburgh strikes again. This time a 19 yr old shot and ki-led less than 500 feet from headquarters. [https://www.cbsnews.com/pittsburgh/news/pittsburgh-man-shot-market-square-police-investigation/] And just like clockwork Bill and the execs are silent regarding employee safety in and around the buildings. Not surprised considering how they treated the RTO announcement. Just set it and forget it. Not to mention they are also incredibly silent about the cost of RTO. Remember folks RTO has nothing to do about collaboration and innovation, no, no, no, RTO is purely demanded to keep real estate numbers up. Don’t you get it folks. We are a disposable pawn used as leverage to keep over extended real estate purchases meaningful. I’m so thrilled to spend $5/gallon $38 parking, to commute 75 minutes to a highly distracting open office and take calls with people all across the nation and fake smile like I enjoy being here. Our team output is dropping like a rock. Lead dev left to go to a competitor. Team morale is slowing losing the battle. Our wallets are screaming. Our raises are comical (if you get a raise). Compensation is 15 years behind. I’m looking at stopping my 401K contributions just to afford the cost of living. What really pi---s us off is everything we did in office last week was no different from what we did while remote. But remember the real estate investments. If you ever wanted to see a real life example of shooting yourself in the foot, look no further. We are watching it play out and we have all summer ahead of us. Don’t forget the real estate investments and the CEO’s 30% comp increase. I hope this drop in production doesn’t hurt me and my team’s end of year reviews.

My manager just discussed it - apparently majority of the OT employees think RTO is fine.

I work out of an office but most folks I collaborate with are virtual! It feels unfair.

And yes, I have started applying externally..not out of spite for RTO but because I am ready for a level up financially. The 2% raises are not helping at all.

I have it on good authority that the next round of layoffs will be mid-July. This first one was more of a reorganization and getting rid of low-output associates. The next one will be based on attendance and people who don't fit the ways of working set forth. July 7th or 14th is being floated around as the date. I would highly recommend people who want to keep their jobs to come into the office on time and leave at 5 PM as instructed. Additionally to not abuse the flexible pto that is granted. Your peers and leadership are watching and keeping track of in-seat and badge swipes.

I feel watched constantly. My keystrokes, my mouse moves, my breaks, my location. It's oppressive and intrusive. RTO has ruined this place.

How many days a week do you come on-site?

Is 1, 2, 3 days a week strictly enforced?

It is deeply frustrating to navigate a demanding, long-distance Return to Office (RTO) mandate while balancing personal caregiving responsibilities, especially when that burden is not shared by the executive team.

The Reality of RTO Disparity

1) Executive Perks vs. Employee Costs: While executives often have commuting costs (limos, premium transport) covered as business expenses, average employees face thousands in annual fuel, vehicle maintenance, and parking costs.

2) The Caregiver Burden: RTO policies disproportionately impact employees with young children, creating immense pressure on work-life balance that senior leadership—whose families are often grown—frequently fail to recognize.Impact on

3) Retention: Research indicates that 80% of companies that enforced strict RTO mandates experienced talent loss, with high-skilled, senior-level staff, and women being the most likely to leave.

Comment your hot takes here.

Heard several people were impacted with the latest wave of ‘Coffee Badging’, anyone know what metric and timeframe this is for? I heard they were going to pull reports from January-May for those under 7 hours a day, can any manager here confirm?

That's it. Easy surveillance.

I am expecting more layoffs. I have no insider info. I feel that they are going to keep pushng in the same direction. This means job cuts.

Lookat the stock price. It has gone up several times over since 2023, and guess what else started happening around then? The employee count began dropping hard. That is not a coincidence.

The stock price is what they are watching. it's not our frustration stress & complaints. Not our objections to RTO. Not 100s of posts about loyalty. Nah, not workload too. None of that matters when the number they care about keeps moving in the direction they want.

And now they are starting to believe AI can make human labor worth less than it is today. I hope that is wrong. I really do. I am almost certain it will not. But it sure feels like that is where this is headed.

Bill’s talking about how RTO will help teammates further their careers, etc, but that’s 100% NOT TRUE if there are no advancement opportunities in your line of work in your geographic location. I was hired to work remotely and at that time my advancement opportunities were open (or at least more open than they are now) because Truist was OK with remote work. Now I have to go into an office that has nowhere for me to grow, OR I have to move to a more expensive city that will eat up any difference in salary I might get with a promotion. The lack of leadership’s acknowledgment of this impact is so disappointing.

How will RTO be used in place of a layoff? The managers in my group don’t even show up all the time and take a lot of PTO during connect weeks.

I assume nothing will really happen to managers but what will the trickle down impact will this have on their teams? I assume managers are also nagged about their attendance?

I wish I knew who I could rant to but I'm way too careful about sharing my work-place political views. RTO has totally uprooted my life from cost of childcare, time wasted on commute, routine, and even my work itself. Talk about being more efficient, eh? Literally cannot get the same amount of work done if im being pulled in 12 different directions each day just to make sure im doing my work from one spot and not another i.e my home. What a super cool and awesome thing this all is. The only thing that motivates me more than getting yelled at for "non-compliance" is SPITE. You want me to quit? No thanks. However, with my flexibility now gone, there goes yours as well. Taking calls after hours? No. 110% effort? Try 50. It's been said before but dear lord what are they thinking? THOUSANDS of employees with FOUR MONTHS time to get read for the dreaded RTO yet ZERO MF GUIDELINES?

The guidelines are vague by design, because they want us to assume what the rules are. I dont want to tell others what to do but please dont make this easy on them. Most of our positions were originally based around a hybrid schedule from the get-go.

Companies may be able to enforce attendance policies, but they cannot force genuine engagement or loyalty. When businesses prioritize rigid systems over practical realities and employee trust, they often risk losing their most valuable people.

https://m.economictimes.com/magazines/panache/rules-are-rules-employee-quits-after-company-forces-5-day-office-return-manager-regrets-it-a-month-later/amp_articleshow/130970516.cms

It's been an attrition tool everywhere else, first and foremost. But people are hanging on to their jobs. The market is brutal, so they're meeting all the RTO demands. I wonder how this will actually play out here.

To have a modern workforce, nimble, ready to work at anytime and anywhere, and now they return us to our father’s old fashioned office drudgery.
We aren’t “liberated” we’re back to being pawns and cogs whatever you want to call it!
All that investment in tech just to have it wasted with commutes into the office wasting time on traffic on delayed subways or the MBTA commuter rail.
“We’ve come a long way baby”
Fools oops you didn’t think licking us down for three years in Massachusetts would have a deleterious effect to the local economy real estate and restaurants?!!
Now six years into it all of a sudden it’s back to work slave.

It is an open secret that many employees across major hubs—including Hopkins—are navigating the RTO mandate by doing the bare minimum, coming in person for few hours/two days a week, leaving laptops on Monday locked with Kensington T-Bar laptop Lock ($15) at or under a desks overnight to simulate presence, and take them off on Thursday or Friday. They all got 100% RTO compliance for last 4-5 months given RTO enforcement uses IP address tracking which is also our OFFICIAL "Talent" and "Performance" Metric for year 2026 (no other company or bank has this metric).

It’s an open secret that most employees hit 60-100% compliance while they were actually working from home, just by using U.S.bank Teams (attend meetings from home) and Outlook (compose reply emails) all from mobile phones at home or elsewhere (Hawaii vacation). I myself tried last month at Knoxville and yes it worked, but made sure to just get 60% RTO compliance so I do not get caught, but surprised to see many doing it without any fear.

Question: Why did Gunjan approved this ineffective 60% RTO compliance by our D-MB SEVP-HR with IP tracking as performance metric? What were she thinking? Is Gunja equally D-MB - like the CXO suite mocks her?

If anyone from management or HR is reading this, please don’t change our current WPE policy. BAC does not give compensation increases to majority of the workforce. Flexibility is the one thing keeping us going. If you want people to quit, it will be the wrong people. Seriously an employer who wants to continue to have a flexible 3 days in office schedule.

A Reddit post in r/bell claims that Bell has been firing employees “with cause” for not returning to the office three days a week, allegedly with no severance and no prior warning.

One commenter, who says they were terminated, argues that this is unfair because they were working from their designated office two days a week plus another Bell office on a third day most weeks. They also claim they worked more than the standard 37.5 hours per week and had strong performance reviews.

Their main argument is that, while companies can set return-to-office rules, terminating someone “with cause” should normally require progressive discipline first, such as a verbal warning, written warning, suspension, and then termination, unless the behavior qualifies as severe misconduct. They argue that simply not being in the designated office three days a week, or “coffee badging,” should not automatically count as severe misconduct unless the employee is also failing to work their required hours, which could be considered time theft.

Overall, the discussion is about whether companies are using RTO enforcement as a way to terminate employees without severance, and whether missing office-day requirements should legally or ethically justify a “for cause” dismissal.

There is no specific cure, vaccine, or antiviral treatment for hantavirus pulmonary syndrome (HPS). The only effective treatment is early detection and supportive care, typically in an intensive care unit (ICU).

Hope everyone is ready. VP here from LEGACY (not Heritage) TSYS... benefits will be changing next year. Expect changes with time off packages, 401K match, hybrid work (full RTO), and substantial increase in Healthcare costs. You heard it here first.

This company is a total mess. Precisely why I am included in the next RIF in July.

Of course it’s not about collaboration. But companies are worse than pre covid with the on office stuff. I know someone at another company that said a senior manager sits by the door to see who is leaving “early”. Like 5 minutes early. Seriously what is going on? All the big companies are doing it. Spending money monitoring stuff that you thought went away in the early 2000s.

Scharf's mandatory RTO against the disabled has created a MASSIVE unforced liability for the company.

EEOC is prosecuting companies that issue these blanket mandates.

https://www.eeoc.gov/newsroom/fedex-pay-280000-eeoc-disability-discrimination-lawsuit

In the lawsuit, the EEOC charged that in February 2023, FedEx failed to accommodate several dispatchers’ requests to continue working from home and demanded the dispatchers’ return to its downtown Manhattan office, effectively forcing at least one into retirement. The employee, and other disabled dispatchers, previously performed dispatcher duties remotely and successfully for nearly three years. According to the suit, FedEx denied continued telework based on an alleged operational need to have all its dispatchers work in the office and failed to engage with its disabled dispatchers to find alternative accommodations.

“This case serves as a reminder that employers should not take a blanket approach to telework accommodations and should take care to engage in individualized assessments,” said Kimberly A. Cruz, regional attorney for the EEOC’s New York District Office. “Changing the location where work is performed may fall under the ADA’s reasonable accommodation requirements, even if the employer does not allow other employees to telework.”

Such alleged conduct violates the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which prohibits an employer from failing to reasonably accommodate an employee’s qualifying disability, absent undue hardship. The EEOC filed suit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (EEOC v. Federal Express Corporation d/b/a FedEx Express, Civil Action No. 1:25-cv-00454) after first attempting to reach a pre-litigation settlement through its conciliation process.

Arlean Nieto, acting director of the EEOC’s New York District Office, said, “The EEOC is committed to enforcing the ADA and holding employers accountable for denying reasonable accommodations to employees with disabilities.”

The morning ODW went live, workday was still functional for a few hours... Logged into that and it said that site visit dashboards were being retired.

On the official RTO policy page, it states...

"bla bla bla fluff... While attendance will not be actively shared at individual or leader level, this expectation is non-negotiable." - Ok but what exactly does "leader" mean? Direct manager/director? Or execs?

WTF does that even mean? Why can't we see our own site visits? What harm has that done? Leader as in our direct manager, or is it execs as well?

I already keep an excel spreadsheet tracking my own site visits + PTO days because I don't trust the badge readers but why tf would they take those dashboards away anyways?

Maybe it's so managers can't see and warn those who aren't going in often enough? idfk bro..

I genuinely don't think Dell will EVER straight up say "site visits are no longer being tracked" because 99% of people would quit showing up lol. So I can't help but wonder if the wording is purposely confusing to make people think it's being tracked still?

I can survive wave after wave of layoffs, RTOs, and offshoring to India as long as they let me rip darts on the front steps again

This has left a bad taste in my mouth for Fidelity. I got laid off yesterday, I'm a scrum master in Brokerage, L5. It makes sense to me that I was let go because I was one of the only two scrum masters in my chapter that were L5, nonetheless it was still a kick in the chest to get the news. But, I'm surprised Fidelity announced RTO just last week then this happened. If they were smart they should have announced RTO long before and waited for natural selection to kick in to have people leave on their own terms. But who am I to say?

Good luck to everyone else impacted, I hope you find the good in this as I do as well.

All those posts reporting bl oo d baths
All the hysteria
1000 cuts is SOP
The real issue moving forward is RTO less flexibility. How will we be punished if we can’t make it in due to extraneous circumstances?
I heard many ppl complaining this week is there truth to the rumors that they may tweak it? Or is that just wishful thinking?

1. Loans taken to cover payroll. All that LHXNext savings still can't stop the debt created implosion.
2. Accelerating the full transformation into the ENRON of the defense industry.
3. 160 hours vacation and sick combined cap being enforced in certain businesses. Director level approval required above 160 hours combined.
4. Auto rejection of planned sick or vacation leave if not provided with enough advance notice. Override requires manager and second level approval.
5. Rolling layoffs still occurring.
6. Stock price down $70 from recent high of around $370. Currently around $300.
7. Insider selling accelerating.
8. RTO harassment still occurring even with commuting costs skyrocketing due to fuel spikes.
9. Outsourced IT company not getting paid due to cash flow issues. Leads to more service outages and lack of support.
10. Morale has hit a new low. Parking lots emptying rapidly after 5 PM. Only time I've ever seen people leave faster was after a 4 hr college chemistry lab was over.

Please comment with additional information regarding the state of dysfunction @ L3H