#remotework

The traditional five-day office week was sold to us for decades as some kind of sacred law of business. Executives insisted that without people physically sitting in a cubicle, collaboration would fall apart, productivity would tank, and "culture" (whatever that means) would just evaporate.

Then 2020 happened. In a matter of weeks, half the working world moved to their kitchen tables, and it turned out the whole thing was less about performance and more about control.

Here's how the forced remote work experiment kind of blew up the core myths of office culture.

1. The Productivity Mirage

The big scary warning was always: unsupervised employees will slack off. Turns out that was backwards. Multiple studies during the pandemic showed productivity held steady or even went up when people worked from home. No more open-floor-plan noise, no more soul-crushing commutes — people actually got hours of real, focused work done. Turns out showing up isn't the same thing as producing anything. Output matters, not butt-in-seat time.

2. The Collaboration Cult

Leadership loves to say innovation needs "watercooler moments" and everyone breathing the same recycled office air. And sure, in-person brainstorming has its place. But the pandemic proved you don't need five days a week of shared oxygen to collaborate well. Teams got good at async work fast — people had time to actually think before responding instead of just performing enthusiasm in a meeting room. Real connection comes from intentional communication, not a shared zip code.

3. The Real Estate Sunk-Cost Problem

When companies push hard for a full return-to-office despite everyone hating it, the stated reasons rarely add up. A lot of these orgs are locked into 10-15 year commercial leases, and an empty building is just a giant unrecoverable cost sitting on the balance sheet. So forcing people back to their desks is often less about "performance" and more about justifying an expensive real estate bet nobody wants to admit was a mistake.

4. The Illusion of Culture

"Culture" got used as a guilt trip to drag people back to their desks — like camaraderie only exists within four walls. But most people figured out pretty quick that real culture isn't free snacks and a ping pong table. It's psychological safety, respect for your time outside of work, fair pay, and people actually communicating clearly. Once the office perks got stripped away, you could see they were just distractions from bad work-life boundaries the whole time.

The Bottom Line: Outcomes Over Attendance

The whole remote work experiment showed that the five-day office mandate was more of a leftover habit than an actual business requirement. Hybrid setups are a fine middle ground for teams that need occasional in-person time, but the idea that full-time office attendance is non-negotiable just doesn't hold up anymore.

Work isn't a place anymore — it's a thing you do. Companies that don't get that are gonna keep losing their best people to competitors who actually care about results instead of just watching who's in their seat at 9am.

The new CEO is going to be amazing! There will not be any more layoffs, the 401k match will go to 12%, everyone can work remote 5 days a week, all salaries will be increased 20%, annual increases will be 10% minimum, and every teammate will get their very own unicorn!!

Or nothing will change for us grunts in the trenches and the new faces sitting in the same executive offices will still get rich off of us just like the ones currently in those offices. It really su-ks to be us.

My so call manager spend so much time on presents report. Why can't we see their presents report? How about Stankey, pretty sure he works from home at least some of the time.

How is the risk chances for SOW contractors who are Fully remote.
Are they at high risk or safe ?

How do you think this whole RTO debacle will go? Do you think it’s going to crash and burn and Fidelity will admit their mistakes and return to at least some WFH time? Or do you think they will force us to put up with the terrible conditions until enough people quit that will satisfy their reduced headcount need? I need to see a brighter side to all of this nonsense.

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?

As long as you're not on the Gainwell account and not within the contentiental U.S. You have it made compared to the other.

Working on the Gainwell account is as if you're never left Gainwell. As you still have to put up with all the B*S, gas lighting, etc. Now you have the benefit of experiencing from both Gainwell and the NTT leadership directly over you.

Good luck trying to find another position within the company, unless you're off-shore. Most of the available positions for what I do or want to do are based over in India/Asia.
Basically, the hype about you building a career and being who you want to be at NTT, is just that hype, as it baised towards the cheaper labor overseas.

Training that isn't skillsoft. I payed out of pocket myself. It was the only way to get decent training opportunites.

The only upside is I work remote. Which eliminates me having to pay for home visit healthcare that I otherwise would have to pay for , if I had to go into an office. (The wife is disabled and wheelchair bound)

As you can tell, I don't have a high opinion of NTT and my immediate managers. Everyday is like being thrown into a pool with your hands and feet tied to a concrete block, as you try to wade water and catch your breath whenever possible. And they just keep dumping water over your head.

I was laid off this year and I snagged a better job that's more money and remote. I also canceled all my policies and went elsewhere for big savings.

It gets better, plan now and walk away. If i can do it so can you. Usaa is dead, let it die.

When is Plano going to 5 days week in office?

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.

In order to fully actualize Lead to One fundamentals across the employee base, are all remote workers eventually going to be let go regardless of performance?

I work in tech and want to stay anonymous but I am worried almost every day about loss of remote days or just the loss of my job.

I haven't discussed this with my manager yet so would be grateful for input or info anyone has on policy. Here's my situation:

• I work East Coast hours from West Coast (CA)
• I have worked 6am (and sometimes 5am) to 8am from home, then train into the office (I don't own a car...takes about 40 minutes each way).
• I do not work with anyone else in my office...I spend my day on Teams meetings or doing my work.
• I go home at 2pm or 3pm, depending when I started in the morning.

Am I now supposed to haul my bu†† downtown at 4:15am to get my 8 hours in the office? The trains don't even run then! I'm not buying a car just to satisfy this. Honestly, the absurdity of all this is what bothers me the most.

Right now, I'm planning to my boss that he's going to lose access to my work and contacting me until 9am Pacific time. Many of my team and project-related calls fall before that time, so they can either allow me to continue working the way I do or lose my participation in various routines, ability to answer questions and fix stuff...I'm stumped.

Are all remote workers eventually going to be let go regardless on performance?

Enough people around Stankey have finally gotten in his ear and policy changes are in the works. Senior HR leadership is preparing to roll it out in the next 6-12 months.

It will be presented as a "change to presence report requirements."

It will most likely involve quarterly presence requirements instead of weekly, with some (probably not a ton) of leeway for occasional work from home.

The biggest factor motivating the change is problems attracting and retaining new hires - especially younger workers.

Nobody will tell Stankey directly that he was wrong, but it's being couched as "You've done an amazing job transforming our culture! We're ready to take the next step now."

He's bought into that.

Why isn't AT&T cutting the pay for all remote workers?

Guarantee you 90% would stay even with a 10 to 20% pay cut. Make it happen and stop torturing the rest of us. The expense and inconvenience of commuting 5 days a week is outrageous.

They decided to f us over by mandating RTO. We’ll f them over by switching off on Fridays. I’m unofficially on a 4-day week folks until I return to the office.

Thanks Y’all ✌️

Everyone complaining about CareFirst while threatening to quit, yet never following through, and claiming they can find a comparable remote job for the same pay elsewhere is simply blowing smoke.

Good luck to all of you, you're going to need it.

I see an uptick in Retirements, mostly 25 to 35 years experience each. Seems like many are being replaced by first or second year BTC staff performing the job remotely.

Dependence on less experienced, less competent persons working remotely, using AI, seems like a recipe for disaster.

What are examples of disasters, or potential disasters, that you see due to this trend?

About 100 or more people were let go today in Madison, WI. More will be notified tomorrow on August 20th. Many more "remote" jobs across US were also termed.

100s of them remote netflix all day for months, 6 fig with bonus

I’m curious what percentage actually took Cara up on the offer to uproot their lives and move to Minneapolis to serve their bullseye overlords

There’s been talk about EVPs and SVPs being hired as remote employees in cities other than NYC and LA. I don't know which teams. What’s up with that?

People in NYC and LA were told to be in the office and that they can’t hire remote employees, yet some EVPs and SVPs are apparently being hired as remote employees.

Is this really happening?

I am 100% virtual employee. Can I work from International location? I have asked my manager and he said no. I would like to visit Australia and work from there for a month instead of using my pto. Has anyone tried to take the laptop outside rhe country like on a cruise or anything like that?

If I resign I need to give 30 days notice do I really need to show up to office in the final stretch? Maybe last day to turn in my computer. I’m thinking what’s the point it’s not like they can fire me, by the time “not on model” shows up I’ll be long gone.

I see some people remote on Teams, can i request remote option, right now inperson bh , i work long hours

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.

“Study finds remote workers are far happier and more productive

Remote workers reported much higher well-being, but were also less likely to leave their role

Study also dispels myth that remote workers might feel alienated from co-workers”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/politics/articles/taking-away-peoples-choice-probably-120000206.html

Has anyone here had success requesting an accommodation to continue working fully virtual due to a disability, rather than being required to meet the in-office/hybrid work requirement? This would be for a transfer position, as my current position is fully virtual (0 days onsite). I’d really appreciate hearing about your experience and how the process went.

After careful consideration, extensive feedback, and realizing that nobody actually wants to commute five days a week, we’re pleased to announce that AT&T has decided to stop pretending 5x RTO makes any sense.

Effective immediately:

• Badge swipes are no longer a measure of productivity.
• Your commute is no longer considered part of your workday.
• Managers may once again manage people based on results.
• Teams may work remotely when the work can be done remotely.
• “Presence” reports will be repurposed for something useful.
• And most importantly, you are no longer required to sit in a building for eight hours to prove you have a job.

Thank you for your patience while we spent several billion dollars and a couple years figuring out what everyone already knew.

The way we work has changed. We should probably change with it.

I really wonder what kind of justifications they’re giving for these long-term remote staff. Are they actually that exceptional? Honestly, you can grow a great engineer from scratch in seven years. Laying off in-office workers while keeping remote ones feels like a deliberate move against company policy.

I am quoting the above words from another post.

As a long-timer at ESG, I have the same question! There are many remote workers based in Dublin, Ireland. Most of them report to the legacy VP and Security Response Director from Symantec.

Why are they protecting these remote workers?

Do we have core customers in Ireland?

Do they possess unique skills that make them irreplaceable?
Skills like programming, reverse engineering, or threat hunting/incident response are common in ESG. We have many engineers in other regions who also possess these skills. And, the VP and the Director have laid off many other office workers who possess those skills.

So how long until all remote positions are gone now that SM is in charge?

“IMO lowering head count for an upcoming merger/sale.”

This was a comment on one thread, and I have heard someone else at work say the same.

Do we think this is what’s going on here?

Are there any possible pros to staying after a sale?

I also heard Abby got fed up with reporting showing that people were not doing as much work from home. (Obviously many of us work better at home and it could have been taken up with those folks. Now everyone’s being punished.

There are "senior leaders" within IT, specifically within the IT S&S org that have been blessed with the ability to be FULL TIME REMOTE.
Why are these "specials" allowed to work from: Florida, Ohio, San Antonio, Houston.
How is it cost effective for all these leaders to spend 3M $ to meet in MN once a month for a week?
Can anyone shed some light on this? Big bright spot light...

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/bank-of-america-ends-back-to-back-remote-days-for-hybrid-staff/ss-AA2a63P6?ocid=msedgntp&pc=ACTS&cvid=6a7f22320f7f47b794912555dfdf4ad7&ei=26

The revised hybrid work policy, including the ban on consecutive remote days and the three-day in-office requirement, will be implemented across all Bank of America offices in the United States. The bank has not disclosed the number of employees who will be affected by this change.

😂😂😂😂 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!

Could someone please clarify how the “4 good weeks out of 6” policy is measured? If it is tied to the 3‑days‑in‑office requirement, does that mean I would only need to be in the office 12 days over a 6‑week period (4 weeks × 3 days)?

Our team provides 24/7 global support, with all communication conducted electronically and no in‑person interaction required—especially for my role. My workday does not begin at 8 AM nor end at 5 PM, and weekend coverage is a regular part of the schedule. Despite consistently meeting or exceeding performance expectations, I have not received a meaningful salary increase in years, and I cannot afford to live near the office.

For me personally, the 40‑hour monthly commute is unpaid, non‑productive time that could otherwise be spent on work or on personal recovery. As a result, the in‑office requirement feels fundamentally misaligned with the remote, round‑the‑clock nature of the role.

Some people seem to genuinely need the office for their social life. Fine. Go in five days a week. Nobody is stopping you.

But I’m not going to work to make friends. I’m here to do a job. And we’re told loyalty is dead and we’re a market-based company, so let’s be honest about the relationship — I sell my time and expertise, AT&T pays me for it. That’s it.

I prefer working with people who can get their sh-t done without an adult babysitter watching over them. If you can’t perform from home, sitting in an office doesn’t magically make you productive. Now you’ve just added a commute and a day full of distractions.

We’re supposed to be here to work, not recreate a nursing-home social mixer five days a week.

If you need the office, have at it. Just stop making the rest of us pay for your social life.

Has anyone tried to get a medical exemption from RTO? Went to my doctor yesterday and found my blood pressure up 20 points from last year, cholesterol, blood sugar up too. My doc asked if I was under a lot of stress at home or work. Told him about RTO after 10 years of remote work and the stress of the commute. He offered to prescribe remote work. Will USB honor this or will they fight? Do I just give the note to my manager?

I learned that not all MN based remote employees that live within 25 miles of an office will lose their remote status. In some cases, if a team is small and has only a few members that fall into this target group, they will not be required to RTO.
WTH?
I am not in favor of the RTO - but if they are gonna do it, shouldn’t it be EQUITABLE?
Alert to those who got the letter with demand to RTO, there may be discrimination.