Thread regarding Verizon Communications Inc. layoffs

@2toa+1rkckQ8L I was in Bell Atlantic Way back in 1993 and our class had an average employee tenure of 23.5 years. This was the lowest the # the mod’s had seen yet & it was because Bell Atlantic Mobile had about 20% of the class with 4 yrs or less per BAM employee. Guess the CHRO ’s is PROUD to have cut that down by 10 years!!!

@3dls+1rkckQ8L By the time RTO is implemented the dynamic will change, the market will be in favor of the labor pool ...

in a world where AI and outsourcing reins? very convincing

By the time RTO is implemented the dynamic will change, the market will be in favor of the labor pool and it will be buried just like every other iteration. Play the game, it will be a big nothing after the next reorg which will be in another year.

Get back to the office and stop complaining !

RTO and moving employees to central locations is incoming.

@2qno+1rkckQ8L You can whine and complain about how RTO is this and that. Still, the truth of the matter is that big corporations are pushing RTO mandates left and right, asking employees to report to an office 3-4 times/week, or face termination, VZ is not an exception.

Anyone living hrs. away from a VZ hub should already be planning to move closer. For those whose teams already RTO but remain home with the excuse that they are not colocated with the team or boss .... get ready for a rude awakening

and Verizon is not the exception

The tenure numbers are severely skewed by director level and above and also well connected managers. Their teams have been thrown under a bus and yet year after year their own skin is saved. Some of these hacks are 30 years in and the deck chairs just get rearranged with every reorg.

RTO will not affect the move of the workforce offshore. Employees are SIGNIFICANTLY cheaper offshore, and there are tax incentives, especially in Ireland, for maintaining a workforce there. Go ahead, go back to the office, but it won't prevent them from offshoring your job.

A tenure this long is not a positive. Particularly when the company has been taking on water for almost a decade. It's a sign of management not doing their job holding a high enough bar. That starts at the top with the board to Hans throughs his directs down to most line managers. The 12.9 years is a symptom of the problem not a testament to some great HR or leadership initiative. The opposite is true. The company is irreversibly broken.

Culture and employee well being? How can she make statements with a straight face? I had worked at Verizon for over 25 years. The last 15 years I was ranked as exceeding each year. I had three months away from work due to a medical condition and when I returned was taking 20+ medications daily, so you can imagine a little scrambling of the brain. I scheduled a meeting with HR at my request to provide background related to my absence and current state taking medications. HR's response was pretty much no worries. Several days later following a staff meeting, I spoke with the person above me regarding the political comments he made during the staff meeting while informing everyone that he has lost friends and no longer speaks with family members that disagree with political stance. I said maybe the staff meeting is not the correct place for this type of discussion, especially inferring what may happen to a staff member that disagrees and will be placed along with the former friends and non speaking family members. After 25+ solid years, I was pushed out the door because I disagreed with his stance. Originally, HR agreed with my point of view. But, we all know that HR is not to benefit the employee, but to prevent the company from being sued by the employee.

For HR to take credit for anything other than preventing the company being sued is a joke. They maintain the average number of years cited due to the fact that once you reach a certain number of years, they push you out and hire someone younger from a foreign country for far less money.

Any time that HR starts heavily promoting the value of the employee, the great benefits provided to the employee and how they the employees are their biggest asset, more layoffs are on the way.

Always amused me that if employees are your biggest asset, then why are you always in such a hurry to kick them out the door and replace with someone sitting in a foreign country.

I would hate to see how they treated employees if they were not considered the biggest asset.

As far as RTO, we should be reminded that the only thing 5G brings is more data usage, not revenue. And then they continue about IOT. This has been discussed for at least a decade and they cannot understand that there is limited to zero revenue for IOT. I have not heard of any new revenue streams, so what does this mean. Reduce costs by shipping jobs overseas and exactly what has been happening the last several years. For those complaining about RTO, you are only proving to them that your job can be performed remotely. And if remote from some other U.S. location, then why not at a 70% discounted salary from another country. This company has never been about what someone accomplishes or how well they perform their responsibilities. It has always been about keeping an employee under their control and the supervisor can then take credit for your accomplishments, because you could have only performed so well at their direction.

The entire place is a sewer and HR is the sludge at the bottom.

I had almost 30+ years of service when I was shoved out the door. I remember a time pre GTE, pre MCI when I could have retired with FULL medical benefits at the age of 51. I remember a time when we had pension contributions. I remember a time when our work WAS valued. Apparently Infosys has more talent than me. How's that working for them?

RTO is absolutely NOT needed. Productivity has been proven to be more efficient in a WFH space. A reasonable hybrid schedule would be fine. 1 day a week is best. 2 days is fine IF they also provide a cost of living raise to be able to afford simply coming into the office more often.
Guess who’s actually screaming for RTO?. It’s the charmer’s who have never worked before, the ones who play the “a-s kissing” game, and managers who don’t know how to lead that have been caught with their pants around their ankles. Those types of people have never been productive employees and are able to hide it in an office environment because they are well liked, so the quality of work is overlooked.

But at home, there’s no hiding. You either got your work done or you didn’t. You can either lead your people without being physically present or you can’t. WFH has finally highlighted the true talent of the workforce- and it’s those who thrived because they actually knew HOW to do the work and WANTED to do the work without all the office distractions.

Sooooo, there’s a lot of people with 30yrs and a lot with 1- 10 . Sounds about right.

I went to the url and turned on reader mode and presto. I do laugh a bit since Sam and most of these benefits mentioned havn’t been around near 13 years.

Verizon’s CHRO says these 3 employee strategies are the secret to an average employee tenure of 13 years
Paige McGlauflin, Emma Burleigh
Workers are willing to quit their jobs pretty quickly these days, leaving companies scrambling to find the best ways to retain talent and lengthen the average employee tenure rate.

But Verizon, the telecommunications giant, seems to have found a way to hold onto its employees. The average tenure of around 110,000 workers is 12.9 years, well over three times the U.S. average.

“We call it the special sauce here because I do think it’s quite magical to have employees that stay with you for so long,” Sam Hammock, Verizon’s chief human resources officer, tells Fortune.

Hammock conducts employee “stay interviews” on workers’ first work anniversary and any subsequent milestone, where she asks what has kept them at the company. Her team also gets sizable input from engagement surveys and exit interviews. She says three key aspects of the company’s people strategy help with worker retention: culture, professional growth opportunities, and company benefits.

Culture

“Culture” has become a corporate buzzword in recent years. But Hammock insists that employees won’t feel a sense of culture if leaders don’t model it for them.

“Culture is a verb, it can’t just be something that HR or the CEO puts on paper. It’s what people really feel and experience,” she says.

Hammock says Verizon’s culture emphasizes employee wellbeing as a key aspect to meeting business objectives. Employees will perform better if they feel holistically supported, both in their careers and with whatever personal issues may be affecting them. “Sometimes you can get so focused on the numbers that you forget it’s not just what you do, it’s how you do it,” she says.

The telecommunications company also recently launched a new annual leadership training program called “Raise the Bar,” where attendees are taught what is expected of them as leaders at Verizon, but also engage in peer-to-peer learning and discuss the takeaways with their own team.

Professional growth opportunities

Hammock says that Verizon has long encouraged employees to pursue professional development opportunities, and learn new skills.

Last year, they kicked that up a notch by unveiling an internal platform called “Journey Forward,” in which employees can learn new skills, and grow in their current roles. A major part of the platform is “Talent GPS,” which helps workers identify other roles they’re interested in, what skills or experience the roles require, and how they can develop that experience.

Introducing this platform also meant revamping Verizon’s internal jobs hierarchy. The company overhauled its job taxonomy, creating fewer job categories, and reducing the total number of job codes from 70,000 titles to just 2,100, along with clear descriptions of the responsibilities, skills, and experiences needed for each title. Hammock says the whole endeavor took her team more than a year.

Benefits

Verizon workers, and frontline employees in particular, say a major reason they stay at the company is the benefits, according to Hammock.

Referred to as the total rewards package, employees like the financial benefits in particular, which include tuition assistance, an employee stock equity program called “Stock Together,” as well as short-term and long-term financial planning education, including access to coaches and advisors.

Verizon recently also started offering a benefit called “Secure Your Future,” where the company matches employees’ student loan payments as 401(k) contributions—a new benefits solution available to employers thanks to the SECURE 2.0 Act.

More support for tuition repayment was one of the top requested benefits from employees in an internal study conducted in late 2022, Hammock says. More than 500 workers signed up for “Secure Your Future” the first day it was available in December, and more than 1,450 employees have enrolled.

“The ‘why’ was there for us, when we saw such a resounding demand,” says Hammock. “It’s huge.”

How about the tenure is so high because Verizon was a different company long ago and people stuck it out before all of these changes and leaders.

Is the contents of this published article as of 2/15/2024 available in its entirety?? The web url asks for a paid subscription.

RTO US NEEDED. There are taking the jobs away from us.

And droppIng!