#remotework

I’m asking you to message your director, your executive, your head of department to voice your frustrations. Let’s be real we have proven the remote model works very well. Acquiring BBVA and FirstBank, launching the new PNC website, onboarding over 11 million customers to a new user experience, beating earnings on a consistent basis, consistent dividend increases, record net income multiple times, becoming a top 5 national bank, and most importantly for the executives - a record high stock price less than a week ago. Let’s be real on another front, this announcement is driven by politics, power and greed. Don’t fall for the excuses. Well my friend Jamie Dimon did it, so why can’t we? Our shareholders don’t like empty buildings. Yea right our shareholders care about one thing only, ROI. (See above) Don’t fall for the corporate buzzwords that PNC loves to slurp on. “Being in the office fuels collaboration, sparks innovation, and helps us grow–individually and collectively.” In realty from someone who was five days in office, being in office fuels distractions, a longer commute, a reduce in W/L balance, and our carbon footprint (remember PNC loves the carbon footprint buzz-phrase). When a director or executive visited our floor, we were never approached or asked questions and if we tried to introduce ourself it was at the most a quick wave hi and goodbye. There was no collaboration. You took the time out of your busy schedule to come visit us and we couldn’t get a word in. Which is ironic because here we are yet again at a time where we are not given a chance to get a word in.

Long time FTE

Let’s stop pretending this five days a week RTO mandate is about collaboration, culture, or productivity. We already proved, clearly and measurably, that productivity increased while working remotely. During the pandemic, employees kept PNC stable, profitable, and operational under extraordinary circumstances. That wasn’t leadership from the top, that was workers carrying the bank on their backs.

Now the “reward” is being forced back into offices to sit on Teams calls all day, while absorbing thousands of dollars a year in new costs - gas, parking, commuting time, childcare, daily life friction - in an economy that’s already on fire. Wages haven’t kept up with the cost of living in years, people are stressed across the board, and somehow the solution is to make life harder for the people doing the actual work.

Let’s be honest about what this really is: empty buildings, tax incentives, sunk real-estate costs, and executive optics. Cities are upset. Balance sheets are uncomfortable. And instead of adapting to a proven, modern way of working, PNC chose to protect assets and executive compensation - at employees’ expense.

This decision makes one thing painfully clear: PNC doesn’t care about its people, its so-called “family,” or the reality employees are currently living in. It cares about making top tier executives even richer, no matter the cost. That isn’t leadership. It’s greed wrapped in a RTO memo. 🖕🏻

Typo fixed.

I think managers are already telling their people. It’s so fu---d guys. My coworker got switched and they aren’t even near a major hub or my team. LITERALLY WHAT IS THE REASON??????????????

I am remote, but still waiting for confirmation.

Good luck and godspeed today. It’s the end of the company we know. Already have friends and family closing their accounts.

There is no reason in the world that a full 5 day in office, no exceptions, for every employee mandate needs to be made. Much less so quickly AND during a bank merger. With all the money baby billy dimon is making he just wants more. mgmt likes to make it about collaboration and culture, but really they are just further ruining PNC's culture by forcing this on everyone. PNC already doesnt pay well and is now making everyone incur costs they werent before. PNC had a ton of remote workforce before covid and is now going back on all of that. A lot of people were hired as remote or worked as remote for years before all of this and they are told to go in.... for what? to make sad little billy happy to see people in his offices. The offices su-k! have you been to any of them? what is the incentive for anyone to come in? There is none! pay for parking, additional childcare, food, travel, vehicle maintenance, etc. PNC cant even bump pay a little to compensate when they are making billions each quarter.

Bumping this up for visibility. OP: @ea+1kes6rfnt

After a challenging year defined by stagnant pay, slower hiring, and shifting workplace rules, many employees are heading into 2026 without high hopes. Around 65% believe the U.S. job market will either remain unchanged or weaken compared to 2025. At the same time, 49% expect layoffs to rise, and nearly a third think remote work opportunities will continue to decline.

https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2026/01/13/half-of-workers-predict-rising-layoffs-in-2026-one-third-fear-for-their-job-security/176228/

After giving the return-to-office mandate several months to be fair and well-intentioned, it’s clear this policy creates significant friction without delivering any meaningful benefit—particularly for employees who were hired explicitly as full-time telecommuters. We are now expected to spend personal time getting ready in office attire, commuting, badging in, navigating parking ramps, security checkpoints, and elevators, only to sit alone in a cubicle all day with no teammates in the same state, let alone the same office.

On top of that, there are no assigned desks. Employees routinely arrive to find reserved desks already taken, workstations missing basic equipment, and time wasted simply trying to locate a place where they can do their jobs. This is not collaborative or productive.

Requiring people to sacrifice hours of personal time and incur additional costs to sit alone on video calls all day is not improving productivity, engagement, or morale. It is creating widespread frustration and disengagement. Employees are openly unhappy with this change, and when asked by peers about the policy, they are candid in sharing how illogical and counterproductive it feels. This approach adds inconvenience and resentment while delivering no measurable value.

Is Houston completely unassigned seating now in both towers? If so, brutal to absorb that and RTO 4 days all at once. How is it going for everyone? Strong reactions?

Due to family reasons, I can’t move out of Calgary. Has anyone asked if there is any opportunity to work remote rely from Calgary, or do fly-in fly-out to Kearl or Cold Lake or Norman Wells??

I am not a troll. I am out of options and desperate.

I’m confused on what’s happening.

Are all leaders in the company expected to be hybrid roles now?
For grades 16+, are those remote roles being eliminated?
Or were these layoffs this week just certain org decisions?

Can someone clarify the moves made this week?

It seems the new HR is back with the hammer for colocation.

Contractors, who were remote hired are supposed to be in office during connect week but the full timers in different region are told their position is moved to different region.

You can't be serious!!!! This is an absolute pathetic joke!!!

You can build all the offices you want. The workforce you’re trying to force into them doesn’t want them.

Five day RTO is not culture. It’s wasted time, wasted money, and wasted talent. People commute for hours just to sit on video calls they could do better from home. There is no productivity upside and no data to support it.

The market has already moved on. Over 80 percent of companies offer hybrid or remote work. Younger talent will not choose a dinosaur policy when better pay, flexibility, and trust exist everywhere else.

As older workers retire, you’re forcing out the next generation before they ever commit. That’s not strategy. It’s self sabotage. Keep spending billions on offices no one wants while the talent pipeline walks out the door.

In 2026, which job roles will be eliminated or reduced in the US and staffed in other (low cost) geographies? Scrum Master, RTE, Product Owners, Analysts? Interested in opinions here.

So just to get this straight - there aren’t “remote work weeks” but leaders can just randomly work remote for a day here or there? If they are responding to work emails and engaging in work with their team then they are technically working right? Which means they aren’t taking PTO. Isn’t that remote work? Meanwhile I am expected to be IN the office?

Who is monitoring this? The timecard and attendance piece? Or do rules not apply to “so called” leaders? Asking for a friend and my colleagues who actually follow the rule. Just curious if we should start calling the “speak up but you won’t be heard line.”

Do you think they track us going to the office or not? What do you guys think/do?

RTO so I can join teams calls all day. This sure makes a lot of sense.

Hybrid Creep ! We had WFH. We had RTO. Now, meet "hybrid creep," - The idea is that a combination of carrots and sticks will encourage people to gradually increase their in-office time without explicitly telling them to do so. That means tactics like basing promotions on office attendance, or increasing surveillance of employees or Increasing layoffs.
There’s a meaningful difference between saying “we believe we’re better together” and secretly counting phones in a building.

• One is a point of view, whether it’s right or wrong.
• The other is surveillance dressed up as management.
  Don’t be surprised if corporate culture collapses when leaders stop trusting adults to behave like adults.
  The combination of factors seems to be working: Office attendance rates are rising steadily, even as many firms take a step back from mandates.
  https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/workplace/hybrid-work-return-to-office-creep-af5a62b5

I am noticing that whenever people complain about the RTO suddenly seeing people who are like a-holes about it and being supportive of it which wasn't the case earlier.

Is there like a sudden spike in trolls or ragebaiters?

Also nobody being happy about RTO makes sense and linger on especially when the company has been lying about promising remote or hybrid work but instead they are just effectively trying to ki-l it. Plus the facilities are not in good shape and monitoring in place shows that they just want to control which is another reason to be mad about.

Working in the city can be very expensive. I’d rather drive. Anyone else going to the Long Island facility? How many work out of there? Is there room for one more?

The last few times I have contacted IT, It has been very obvious that they are at home. For instance, one guy was having a party at his house and angrily did everything he could to get me off the phone to return to that party. The last person to help, I could hear an actual rooster crowing in the background. I thought we built these overseas buildings and spent billions of dollars, why are they at home?

The hybrid model was amazing. Assigned or unassigned offices the hybrid was still better. There is no logical reason to go more days than 3 per week. I find the change to be very disappointing. My days at home were days to get things done and I didn’t dread getting up before 5 am to go into the office. I could get up at 7 and go right into the office. Back to the dread on Sundays again. Ugggh!

Crazy thing is it didn't used to be this way. In the days of yore when we were all happily remote little worker bees, we were content if not happy. Dell felt like a people-focused organization, at the very least. We were given latitude to do our own thing, expectations were normal and not overly ambitious, and the individual contributors had a certain degree of confidence in leadership.

Sure, Dell had the very-normal corporate issue of constant change, but the change was navigable. Then suddenly, everything began to change and the water began to boil. It started slowly-people being "encouraged" to use the office. The remote activities quietly disappeared. Does anybody remember the May the 4th Zoom AHOD in 2021 where a bunch of leadership dressed up as Star Wars characters? Stuff like that was objectively fun, and made work feel a bit less like work. That sort of fun just up and disappeared to be replaced with increased unreasonable expectations like suddenly everybody had to commute 10 hours a week to sit on zoom calls that they were perfectly content with and capable of sitting on at home.

Then, the layoffs began, as did a constant state of employment anxiety that has persisted to this day. Then we all received a total of 24 business-hours notice that hybrid was going away and we were all full-time onsite, or face the consequences. Except, there were none really. The layoffs continued to be completely random across the board, if anything affecting the in-office folks more than those that persisted with staying remote.

The result? Everybody who is left (and smart) has quiet quite HARD. I'm personally remote, and work maybe 2 hours a day and still get everything done. The rest of my workday is spent at the gym or with my laptop open while I play video games. And my numbers have never been better.

The thing that objectively takes the most of the time out of my day is trying to come up with 5 stupid questions to ask this stupid chat bot we're training to take over our jobs eventually, because if I don't that's the only thing that actually gets me in trouble with leadership. It's not my Teams' status being yellow for 5 hours a day, or my quote output, or my lack of desire to pursue cUlTuRe and CoLlAbOrAtIoN by driving 15 hours per week, it's my lack of desire to justify Dell's stupid investment into incompetent AI tools that add no objective value to anybody.

I know it sounds like hyperbole when you hear about folks talking about "Dell has changed." Though in reality, Dell actually has changed in a lot of ways, and every, single, one of those changes have been for the worse. And they get away with it because we flipped from an employee's market to an employer's market with the post-Covid tech crash in 2022ish that we still haven't recovered from.

It just really su-ks.

This needed a thread of its own. The OP is @ez+1kdne2h4c.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-visa-delays-prompt-india-remote-work-with-strict-restrictions-2025-12

I know this may not be the ideal place to ask, but I haven’t been able to find much information on Sparq or through my communications with HR, and was hoping this group might be able to share any relevant experience.

I’ve been with Optum Health for several years as a U.S.-based remote employee. Recently, I’ve been exploring the possibility of relocating to Canada. I’m a Canadian citizen, and through my own research I’ve seen that Optum has a few business segments in Canada, with many employees working remotely.

I’m wondering whether anyone has experience with, or insight into, transferring from a U.S. role to the Canadian entity while continuing to support the same U.S. team. I recognize this is a fairly niche scenario, but I’d really appreciate hearing from anyone who has gone through something similar or knows how this has been handled in the past.

Thanks in advance!

RTO is an antiquated strategy based on how the company was in 2010 not 2025. Our roles have changed as have the people, and their locations, that we all interact with. There will be no measure of success because it’s based on a belief in collaboration and nothing more. There is not a single metric that will support it. However I will lay money that sickness and absence rates will rise.

Well said, @a9+1kc3yqn6p.

Anyone have a leader who requires cameras to be on in every meeting? How is this even enforceable?

What about the 2026 remote drilling progam ?

I have only reviewed a few postings so far, but now included is “Please note that per our policy on hybrid/virtual work, candidates not within commuting distance from the posting location(s) will NOT BE CONSIDERED for employment, unless an accommodation is granted AS REQUIRED BY LAW.”

Fully remote are stuck in their positions unless there is a policy change or they are RIF’ed.

Remote employees were once again showered with lavish gifts and people in Milwaukee got nothing. The only give TG the Grinch gave local employees was the gift of paying for more gas to commute, paying more for parking, and extra time in the restroom if you manage to find something to eat at the cafeteria. Bah humbug

What is the latest with Phase 2 RTO and remote workers?

Keep seeing that we are going in firmwide 4 days starting April 1. Can anyone confirm?

Does everyone stick to the 3-4 days in office? Most people I’ve talked to do 2 days if anything - I think riding it out until more days become mandatory.

It’s clear that merit increases are less now for remote workers than onsite, but anyone know for sure about bonuses?

Leaders in past did not consider location and noisy office of its head quarter was the problem in turning company around. My advice sell it and build a nice office convenient to all. Even if it can only house 55% capacity. We can take turns going to office. They forget their ultimate goal of turning company around and instead get entangled in RTO. Without adding another location, now they are shuttering OPO.

https://ogletree.com/insights-resources/blog-posts/paying-remote-workers-less-may-heighten-legal-risks

"Paying remote workers less than in-person workers for performing the same work could increase the risk of discrimination claims."

"Telework policies that tie lower pay to remote work may disproportionately affect women, caregivers, and employees with disabilities, potentially raising the risk of equal pay and disparate impact lawsuits."

"Courts and regulators increasingly expect individualized assessments of job functions, consistent application of policies, and rigorous documentation of legitimate business reasons for paying certain workers less than others in similar jobs. Without data-driven and legally sound analysis, employers could unintentionally adopt telework policies that are difficult to defend in court."

"Reducing pay for exempt employees who work remotely could jeopardize their exempt status in certain situations."

Curious if anyone has any actual intel on the remote workforce strategy? I’m not looking for passive aggressive comments on speculation. I’m trying to get ahead of my own planning. If there’s anyone on here who has some intel, please do tell! I’d prefer what’s next not to be a surprise also.

Remote employee- I requested my return package for my laptop and concession device the Monday after Thanksgiving- I just got an email today saying that 'they've approved my ticket, but there is currently a backlog due to a large number of requests with our vendor.' Then HR tells me that it could 'potentially' impact my severance payout if they don't receive it in time as I'll be gone until the 5th to visit family. Then this morning, we finally get some notification about Dan's 20 million dollar 'retraining' fund that he's been bragging about, and they still kick the can down the road saying that we'll get more details in the coming weeks. How can they layoff 13,000 people and not have prepared for this? Anyone else having these kind of issues?

It's nice to finally hear that DG is trying to accommodate remote workers in thoughtful manner next year!

Sorry to the massive amount of I&C and remote workers impacted. Folks at PB ... if it hasn't happened today it will be tomorrow.