Thread regarding AT&T layoffs

"Still don’t know how I’m going to engage when my team is spread everywhere and I’m the only one sitting in the office."

Before the pandemic in the first "collaboration"/need to be in the office phase, I worked with network engineers that were based around the country that had to go the very small office portion of a CO or garage and work "in the office" for the purpose of "collaboration", even though they were the only one there. Unfortunately, this is not new, and the brainless at the top still think this is a good idea.

My director and my team are in another hub, but I'm considered critical to the team, so I'm staying the lone person on the team in my hub. Doesn't make any sense for me to go to the office, but I'm there my 3 days, at least for a while. The Exceptions to the "local team for collaboration" mantra is already starting and my guess is that it will soon be the rule, instead of the exception, and this whole RTO thing with amount to zilch.

@2oeg+1stTKH3W

As another poster commented, from another thread
THEY. DON’T. CARE

They don’t care, if you go into the office just to get on the same TEAMS calls (because your peers are NOT in the same office and are instead all over the country) just as you do at home.

From T’s perspective- You can “collaborate” with the janitorial staff and/or security personnel if you see them at all when you go to the office.

Still don’t know how I’m going to engage when my team is spread everywhere and I’m the only one sitting in the office. We are a small regional team. There is no one for me to engage with. That’s why we were FTW for years and years pre-covid.

please define "engagement" or how the company perceives this

They seem to show a correlation between high performance and engagement and I hardly see that at all at AT&T.

You are confused about how they are measuring "high performers" AT&T most likely gave them definitions for this and a High Performer is most likely defined as a high engagement employee, making the reference circular and pointless. One of the Root causes of all of AT&Ts problems is how they measure who is good and who isn't. I am an impeccable judge of technical capability and the most qualified and effective people I have ever worked with have never made it past L2/L3 management since SBC took the helm. SBC/AT&T has always and will always be about sycophants first.

Both are totally disengaged.

More like almost everyone is disengaged. And that's Stank and his reports have accomplished. Give them a gold star for that.

I'm seeing more and more of the very things this article is saying is the wrong approach. We have these dashboards that track everything no matter how insignificant. It seems like some people spend more time making sure their dashboard looks good than doing real work. And what's behind the dashboard? Pretty much nothing they are based on out modeled ways of tracking what makes good performance good. it's the "is it better to write 10,000 lines of code or a good 1,000 lines"? Is it better to do 10 things halfway and claim they were completed or actually do 5 things completely? Is it better to fix 5 things that were originally done wrong or to do 3 things the right way so nobody has to come back and fix them later?

This company and their metrics means that often good people will be the ones let go and bad people will be retained. And there will be no reason for supervisors to even know what an employee really does. They will use these metrics for keep or let-go decisions that will result in whatever fat they want to trim not being the fat but the meat.

I find their chart about employees not representative of what I see at AT&T. They seem to show a correlation between high performance and engagement and I hardly see that at all at AT&T. Even the highest performers are totally fed up and complain just as loud as the lowest performers. The toxicity is at all levels. High performers just get thrown more and more and are fed up. Low performers just don't care. Both are totally disengaged.

Would love to see how much hair Stankey would lose

Not possible even with another shave the Stank freak show

Previous poster here who said the paper basically agrees with my methodology…
I particularly like the ‘athlete/artist’ approach and terminology vs the assembly line idea.
T was pivoting toward more of a athlete artist approach when I first started (at least in terms of developers) but they’re definitely attempting to perform a culture shift back to the assembly line way of doing things.

It’s kinda strange considering there’s a wealth of data out there that shows it doesn’t produce the best results.

My only response would be they’re doing it because they don’t want to retain or foster talent, they want to cut talent and they know it doesn’t work but their current focus isn’t to foster innovation, peak productivity, and employee satisfaction but quite the opposite. They’re attempting to force employee dissatisfaction, low productivity, and attrition because the debt is so bad that even higher performance won’t dig them out of the hole they’ve dug.

That's why the culture survey results will never see daylight. Its a compelling argument to the c-suite's lack of leadership, they are stuck in the stone age mentality.

Interesting…I read the paper and they basically espouse everything I’ve said and how I run my teams…
Kinda weird I agree with them on this.

Would be curious if the Stank has seen this, probably - and I doubt he cares.

But I was told that anyone that opposed RTO was lazy and we couldn’t POSSIBLY be working at home! Field techs thay have no idea what we do told me this, so you know it’s a solid analysis.