#commute

Every single day I hear of more people from corporate that are leaving the company. Primarily Planning positions. I am certainly not overlooking this. Think there will be a ton within the next 2 months. All the commuters will be done the first of the year too. Good luck to everyone

I can only imagine many others are in an even worse predicament than I am. And for what? RTO has been rolled out across the country for quite a while now, and there’s plenty of data showing that none of the things they talk about, like collaboration or efficiency, actually improve by herding us back into the office. The only explanation is that they want to make a lot of us quit.

Can anyone direct me to how to get ride share benefits at Chevron?

Ah, the newest corporate gospel has arrived. Another “inspirational” RTO email reminding us that being in the office builds connection — which is ironic, considering I haven’t connected to anyone except the guy who keeps stealing my chair.

Leadership preaches “collaboration,” but what they really mean is: we signed leases, now fill the seats.
They’ve got family photos, doors, and flexible calendars; we’ve got assigned burnout.

The new buzzword of the week? “Ten toes down.” Cute. I guess that’s easy to say when your toes aren’t in traffic for two hours a day.

Every line of these emails reads like it was generated by a bot trained on stale HR slogans. “Culture!” “Teamwork!” “Innovation!” — all while the rest of us are juggling hot desks, dropped calls, and existential dread.

If they actually believed in teamwork, they’d try working by the same rules they force on everyone else.
Until then, spare us the sermons and just call it what it is: office rent recovery.

Says the executive living in a multimillion-dollar home just 30 minutes from Deerfield, with a $100,000 car parked in a heated garage. If I were making $500,000 a year, I’d probably enjoy the daily commute in a brand-new Mercedes too.

If executives truly want camaraderie, perhaps they should rent city apartments and commute alongside us - waiting for buses and trains together this February when it’s -15 degrees with windchill would certainly build solidarity.

The truth is, we already proved during Covid that collaboration doesn’t depend on geography. Microsoft Teams and instant communication make it possible to deliver on time and at a high standard. To suggest otherwise is 100% disingenuous.

I was genuinely hoping for more detail on RTO during this afternoon’s Town Hall. Instead, it was barely mentioned. But at least now I know how many kids our executives have and which sports teams they root for - that’s exactly the information I needed to finally sleep soundly tonight.

It’s here just to push out as many people as possible on the cheap. If I’m wrong, convince me otherwise. Give me one example of RTO actually improving collaboration, efficiency, morale, productivity, anything, really. All I’ve gained is more time wasted commuting and higher expenses. I balance out the idiocy of RTO by making sure I’m not available after hours. None of it makes sense unless you see it for what it is - a way to make people quit.

Almost two hours wasted on the commute. On a good day. Feels like that was the plan from the start, to force people out without paying a dime. People mention real estate/tax incentives as the main driver of RTO, but I think it’s mostly about cutting headcount on the cheap. Everything else comes second. Time will tell.

The office has become a shell. For those who have returned, it feels like working in a morgue — silence, no collaboration, no energy. At least at home people could put the radio on and feel some life around them. We tried free coffee for a week, but once that was gone, so were the people. Now we have staff commuting in only to sit in isolation on video calls. It is soul-destroying, and I worry about the mental impact on those who are complying. If management isn’t prepared to properly enforce office attendance, then this halfway approach is pointless and damaging.

We never see the guy in the parking garages - not in Ross, not in DalPark. We never see the guy roaming the headquarters either. The guy lives in Bluffview, TX - one of the wealthiest neighborhoods of all of Dallas. He gets driven 15 min to the HQ in his Range Rover and parks in private parking. Then proceeds to take his private elevator that lights up straight to floor 4.

Yet, I have to commute from McKinney - a middle class city to downtown and sit in bumper to bumper traffic. I am waitlisted from DalPark so pay 50 bucks per month to park in Ross. But that requires taking a crumby shuttle past the homeless to global HQ. So, I decide to pay double for parking and pay the daily parking fee at Ervay St and then walk over 5 min to headquarters. I pass several suspicious, crazy, and homeless people and realize I don’t have any pepper spray on me. Once I get in HQ, I see impressive led screens then take the elevator to floor 8 where the monitors, keyboards, and mouse haven’t been refreshed since 2010. Just 2 floors above Stankey where the floor was recently redone.

1 company. 2 different people. 2 very different lives. Rules for thee but not me.

I was rushing to get to work before 7am so I can find a parking spot and desk. it’s a waste of money and time by coming in to the office

True? Another cost cutting move forcing employees into long commutes.

RTO really boils down to two drivers: control, and the financial interests that CxOs hold in commercial real estate companies. The more employees are physically in the office, the more those properties stay profitable. It has little to do with productivity and everything to do with money and power.

On a personal level, RTO has increased my monthly costs by about 25% compared to working from home. Between gas, parking, meals, and other daily expenses, the difference adds up quickly. On top of that, I’m losing about 90 minutes a day to commuting - time that could have gone into either more focused work or simply maintaining some balance at home.

So while companies frame RTO as being about culture or collaboration, for workers it often just means higher costs, less time, and no real improvement in output.

A pay cut? Loss of benefits?

I have a few offers on the table paying less. Some have little to no benefits.

The math says i should stay here but its hard to put a figure for savings on things like mental well being, commute, and not being exposed to every single strain/wave of covid.

So my question is, what would you give to never have to go to the office again?

Anyone else wonder if productivity has diminished with the 4 day a week requirement? Everyone was already burnt out from the ever growing workload. Add the commute and I continue to see people’s ability to care fading away.

The sheer volume of work communication is overwhelming. It feels like I'm stuck in a tailspin of Jira tickets, Slack and Teams messages, and endless slide decks and worthless meetings. Data is buried on the network; nobody seems to care. The work itself is often straightforward, but the process we're using is a mess filled with red tape and bureaucracy. It's no wonder we're constantly redoing work and bleeding money. Recalls are the norm, and we've only seen the tip of the iceberg, folks; thousands of cars with the same inherent issues will soon go belly up. $$$ spent on new buildings and programs with little hope for success. I have a feeling layoffs are just around the corner, which is how things usually go here. F