IT EMG here who knows a direct report to one of the EC members. The EC know that remote IT employees are a liability because those folks end up forcing the rest of the IT staff to sit in Zoom calls all day which reduces productivity across the board. The EC know this is true across all the LOBs.
The current cover story is that remote employees will be put in teams together to solve this problem and teams impacted by RTO will be reorganized to be geolocated. There is no intention to do this. The actual plan is to continue rolling layoffs throughout 2024 and bring on 3P to continue cutting costs, especially with respect to the Websphere migration.
The bad news for IT employees who are currently impacted by RTO is that numerous roles will not be backfilled by 3P, including the bloated Agile staffing. Instead the work with be spread out among existing IT employees. So your workload will continue to increase. This is also another tool to produce forced attrition.