#officeculture

The new operation isn't what it was promised to press.

Hours are thin..sales still not what they were before all that calamity

I Do think we will be closing in Northbrook and I've heard Oakbrook has been pretty slow too

LMAO..WFH for the next three weeks!

How pathetic is it that Canon provides these slum-like conditions?

So embarrassing for a company of their size.

RTO is getting exciting. My work area is over capacity, so I’m assuming the normal agenda is:

8:55 - Make awkward eye contact with someone already sitting in a chair
8:57 - Still searching for a chair
9:00 - Find a chair
9:15 - Defend chair
9:30 - Establish territorial boundaries
10:00 - “Collaboration”
10:15 - Someone steals my chair

Next time put Musical Chairs Corporate Edition, in the calendar invite.

I’m exploring alternative workspaces. Current availability:

My assigned desk - occupied by someone who got here before sunrise

Conference room - booked through 2047

Phone booth - currently housing three people and a flute

Break room - apparently eating lunch is considered “collaboration”

Lobby - security says I can’t plug my laptop into the revolving door

Cafe - one table, 37 people, and someone has already claimed the outlet

Stairwell - “not an approved workspace,” despite having excellent acoustics

Bathroom - HR has asked that I stop referring to Stall #3 as my “private office”, also has excellent acoustics

Parking lot - Wi-Fi signal mysteriously disappears once I cross the property line

Elevator - currently occupied, but I’m confident I can squeeze in with my laptop and spend the day riding between floors while aggressively maintaining eye contact on Zoom

My car - becoming the strongest candidate

I’m sure leadership has a flexible solution.

Apparently “return to office” means return to the general vicinity of the office and figure the seating situation out amongst yourselves. Our return was planned, but seating wasn’t.

Hearing rumors they are not looking at just badge swipes any more and are now looking at ip addresses of laptops and where people are accessing the network from.

Has anyone heard more about this?

How long are we staying in the office, if there is a badge-out system?

Is there a “minimum number of hours required”?

Does anyone know the “rules”?

Was just informed that my designated working area is over capacity by 10-15 heads. “Expect some flexibility” I’m sorry but who decided it was okay for someone to not have a seat to DO THEIR WORK IN. I shouldn’t be surprised anymore but here we are. If I don’t have a seat, and am expected to work in the cafe off one tiny laptop screen, I’m politely turning around and driving home. If HR comes knocking, I’m claiming harsh working conditions because this is absolutely ridiculous.

Once we are full RTO, planning on having lunch in my car with a few IPAs.

Lots of out of office notifications. What’s up with that?

If executive logic dictates that the office is a temple of collaboration, the reality on the ground often resembles a sensory nightmare. The most glaring flaw in sweeping return-to-office mandates—at Fidelity and across the multinational financial sector—is a fundamental miscalculation of modern organizational geography.

The modern financial workforce is inherently distributed. A Vice President in Boston is rarely working exclusively with a team sitting on the same floor. Their direct reports, stakeholders, and project partners are spread across regional hubs in Rhode Island, Texas, Ireland, and India.

This creates the defining absurdity of the 2026 RTO push: the "Zoom-in-a-Room" paradox.

Workers are suffering grueling commutes, paying inflated prices for parking and gas, only to arrive at an open-plan desk to strap on noise-canceling headphones. They spend their required eight hours on the exact same Microsoft Teams and Zoom calls they would have taken from a quiet home office.

The Degradation of the Physical Space
The physical reality of the office has also degraded. During the pandemic, firms aggressively reconfigured their real estate, embracing "hot-desking" and "hoteling" to cut costs. Now that they are forcing the workforce back, the infrastructure is buckling.

Employees report arriving to find no available desks, forcing them to work from noisy cafeterias. The promised amenities that supposedly make the commute worthwhile—subsidized cafeterias, high-end coffee bars, dry cleaning services—have often been drastically reduced or eliminated entirely. Instead, workers describe environments that are loud, crowded, and lacking basic privacy.

When an employee says, "it's loud, it smells, and the services are terrible," they are pointing out the hypocrisy of the mandate. The C-suite demands a return to a premium, collaborative environment that simply no longer exists.

The Verdict: A Crisis of Purpose
This is the ultimate failure of the blunt-force RTO mandate. You cannot mandate cross-continental collaboration by forcing a local employee into a cubicle.

When workers are commanded to commute simply to stare at a screen and speak to people in different time zones, the office ceases to be a hub of innovation. It becomes a deeply inefficient call center.

If executives like Abigail Johnson truly want to foster mentorship and solve complex problems, they must acknowledge that the geography of work has permanently changed. Pretending that a Boston turnstile swipe somehow improves collaboration with a team in London is an exercise in corporate fiction. Until leadership recognizes that the office must serve a specific, intentional purpose rather than acting as a mandatory holding pen, the divide between the C-suite and the workforce will only widen.

I've heard 5, 6 and 7 as the minimun required for in-office RTO compliance
But someone just said 6.5

Omg these take two with OA videos is so cringey. Wtf are we even doing???

I am being told by my band 3 managing director that Merrill will be 4 days in office, regardless of location or office/assigned seat/flex seat. Client facing areas may be 5 days in office if they are not already.

It's happening folks, enjoy the weekend.

😂😂😂😂 no one is on my floor today. It is so empty! I am going home now - guess I missed the memo that RTO is optional.

DO NOT COMPLY! Bill’s gonna cry!

What do these people do all day? Honestly they never get back to tickets. It’s like pulling teeth for simple requests. Why are they outsourced to “Beacon Hills Staffing”? This company wastes so much money. Go back to the 90s when we had actual employees in the building handling requests in a timely fashion.

Today at the office in Tempe they were going to have a pizza party for the upcoming conversion and everyone both in office and remote declined attending. It is kinda sad and funny.

Am I the only one who has noticed that the Webster, NY buildings feel warmer this summer than they did last summer? There is zero cool air movement in some of the labs and some of the cubicle areas. One lab in particular, which we used to call "Ice Box," is now "The Bahamas." It is literally that hot in there.

Will all the dinosaurs will go extinct after RTO ? or they will flourish ?

Did they auto assign seat for you or did you get to pick your seat? I would hate to have to sit to a loud talker or someone eating microwave fish next to you

I'm thinking about joining our grossly overpriced onsite fitness center and hop on a treadmill sometimes during the day. You have to badge in/out of course in our surveillance state. Anyone know if the system would subtract this time from the 8 hour requirement?

Hey bootlickers! Please stop monitoring where everyone sits. Someone reported me that I'm working from the cafeteria. Hey MF you obviously have ZERO work to do to care that much. Joke is in you, my manager don't even care where I sit. And yes I'm gonna sit by the snacks, the sun, away from you. WTF this place is he-l.

Checking in to see where everyone is at on the mood elevator? Remember those days?

So, what do those Texans think of your OU and OSU degrees?

Keep spending money (It’s someone else’s laws).

Who is commuting 5 days a week, 60 miles each day. $25 per day in travel costs not including parking.

Aren’t you exhausted? Needs to be at least 3-4 years until Plano HQ.

Finding new employment in Dallas doesn’t help as commute doesn’t change. Those who work in Plano office are super lucky.

I think The Goalpost was a really cool idea. It was fun to watch a game with your colleagues on a large screen. This was a great idea corporate had. I will miss it.

Don't trust anyone here. People will pretend to be your friend, get you to open up, and then use it against you. The whole culture is toxic.

Target is requiring its merchandising employees to return to the office four days per week, an increase from the previous three-day mandate. This change affects buyers, planners, and inventory management staff. The company stated that increased in-person collaboration will lead to faster decision-making and stronger partnerships. This move aligns with a broader trend of companies increasing in-office requirements for employees. The new policy takes effect in early September.

Minneapolis, Minnesota

https://www.startribune.com/target-calls-entire-commercial-unit-back-to-minneapolis-hq-four-days-a-week/601868134

What's happening?

They don't want to hear certain opinions that differ from their own.

They want to silence voices when CDW already does that in exchange for letting us keep our jobs.

Go ahead and copy and paste a long winded nonsense to ratio other coworkers opinions and thoughts. Maybe another poem about across the pond or about the winters in NY. Maybe spam with foreign languages posts.

Great people and culture.

Spew this to customers and see what happens.

YOU ALL SHOULD KNOW CUSTOMERS CAN VISIT & READ EVERYTHING ON THIS SITE AS WELL!!!

what to do about a coworker who just loves to run around the story and gossip all the time.

AT&T “leadership” needs to wake up and start making hard decisions about where capital is actually creating value and stop wasting it on nonsense.

Starlink and SpaceX are no longer just interesting companies to watch and laugh about. They represent a serious long term existential threat to traditional telecom like AT&T, and Wall Street is clearly paying attention. The recent 30% decline in AT&T’s stock price reflects the growing concerns about the company’s future and its ability to compete in a changing industry.

AT&T employs roughly 100,000 people, and maintaining a large and widespread office footprint comes with enormous ongoing costs like office leases, utilities, HVAC, water, janitorial services, security, parking, maintenance, supplies, and countless other facilities expenses in the neighborhood of $2B-$4B annually.

A reduction in unnecessary office space and a more flexible virtual first approach could free up tens of billions of dollars used for real competitive investment. That’s capital could be redirected toward the things that will actually determine whether AT&T wins the next decade like network investment, technology, spectrum, AI, innovation, and attracting and retaining top talent.

Instead, we’re continuing to wastefully spend billions on office space each year while also building a new multi billion dollar HQ nobody (besides Stink) wants or needs. At a time when the company is facing its biggest competitive threat in history, is that really the best use of capital?

AT&T doesn’t need to waste more billions proving employees can sit in a building like it’s 1960 in 2026. It needs to spend its available billions proving it can compete in the future, and right now morale is so low because of RTO that nobody here is motivated or cares at all.

If leadership is serious about competing against starlink, then capital should follow strategy. Go after the easy low hanging fruit and reduce the unnecessary facilities and associated costs, rethink archaic RTO requirements, and invest those dollars where they’ll actually generate a real competitive return. Ending the RTO nonsense seems like one of the easiest and most obvious places to start.

Too bad this “leadership” team is full of proven losers who can’t admit they got it wrong, again. One man’s ego and stubbornness will be the demise of a once great American company. Sad!

AT&T “leadership” needs to wake up and start making hard decisions about where capital is actually creating value and stop wasting it on nonsense.

Starlink and SpaceX are no longer just interesting companies to watch and laugh about. They represent a serious long term existential threat to traditional telecom like AT&T, and Wall Street is clearly paying attention. The recent 30% decline in AT&T’s stock price reflects the growing concerns about the company’s future and its ability to compete in a changing industry.

AT&T employs roughly 100,000 people, and maintaining a large and widespread office footprint comes with enormous ongoing costs like office leases, utilities, HVAC, water, janitorial services, security, parking, maintenance, supplies, and countless other facilities expenses in the neighborhood of $2B-$4B annually.

A reduction in unnecessary office space and a more flexible virtual first approach could free up tens of billions of dollars used for real competitive investment. That’s capital could be redirected toward the things that will actually determine whether AT&T wins the next decade like network investment, technology, spectrum, AI, innovation, and attracting and retaining top talent.

Instead, we’re continuing to wastefully spend billions on office space each year while also building a new multi billion dollar HQ nobody (besides Stink) wants or needs. At a time when the company is facing its biggest competitive threat in history, is that really the best use of capital?

AT&T doesn’t need to waste more billions proving employees can sit in a building like it’s 1960 in 2026. It needs to spend its available billions proving it can compete in the future, and right now morale is so low because of RTO that nobody here is motivated or cares at all.

If leadership is serious about competing against starlink, then capital should follow strategy. Go after the easy low hanging fruit and reduce the unnecessary facilities and associated costs, rethink archaic RTO requirements, and invest those dollars where they’ll actually generate a real competitive return. Ending the RTO nonsense seems like one of the easiest and most obvious places to start.

Too bad this “leadership” team is full of proven losers who can’t admit they got it wrong, again. One man’s ego and stubbornness will be the demise of a once great American company. Sad!

Any one see the signup post on the basking ridge slack for red chairs on 7/16 in BR? Is this some sick twisted joke?

Stock @$20 but we gonna get a new golden palace in Plano! Will anyone be left to sit at a desk there?

Curious what your locations are like around the use of flex office space. As we know these offices should be used for private conversations or meetings as needed and not to be used for a full day of work. Is your location like mine where anyone with an SVP officer title are all self absorbed and have turned these spaces into their own personal offices and not allowing fair access to them? Extreme ego maniacs, you’re not that important!

I know of no one that has ever been written up or chastised for not coming to the office though. If you are an individual contributor you did your job fine during COVID and there is virtually no reason for you to come into the office anymore. I mean the office is louder, more chaotic, food is as expensive as anywhere else. People are more likely to stand around and socialize than do actual work. The commute time of the individual gets baked into the work day more often than not because they only have so many hours before they need to take care of the household. It is abhorrently inefficient. To top it all off very few teams are fully located in one office. So you are effectively coming in to simply jump on conference calls with teams from all over the world literally. I can understand a once a week requirement just because we are social animals and there is genuine need for socialization with one another. Outside of once a week though it is strictly suboptimal working conditions. Also just imagine the savings if VZ truly sold off all its offices and cancelled all leases.

Perfectly stated, @jb+1kv47wr3d.

Rep for Chicago suburbs here. I’m getting phone calls from 5 different Jewel stores today looking for service. F that. I’m not picking up and leaving my phone on for sh--s and giggles.

WHY IS IT ALWAYS COLD AT CIC. I AM FREEZING.