It is abundantly clear that location strategy is nothing more than a poorly disguised plan to fire employees for arbitrary reasons. You want to consolidate real estate? Ok, that’s fair enough, but there are better ways to go about doing that.
In my LOB I continue to see a significant number of mid level managers and executive director level contributors that are still either remote or in non-hub locations. A lot of institutional knowledge will be lost if they were all let go at once, and this would certainly be detrimental to the business and create operational risk. Management knows this and seems to trying to tread carefully on the topic of location strategy, for now at least.
Meanwhile there are rumblings here about other locations moving in and out of “hub status” for various LOBs. Some LOBs haven’t even clarified what their specialty locations are, which I suspect is because it is still subject to change and they are still figuring it out. It feels like such a sh!t show and is really impractical all around given the vastly spread-out nature of this company. I am hoping that management will be forced to rethink this asinine strategy at some point before too much damage is done.