#remotework

Any updates on if they are expanding the RTO radius for MN and DC?

As of October 1st, all telecommuters who have company paid home internet, or company reimbursed home internet, will be losing that benefit... because why not, right?

"We recognize this change may have an impact on some employees. To help you prepare, we are providing more than 90 days' notice before the policy takes effect."

https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2026/06/29/remote-work-from-home-loneliness-epidemic-americans/90651835007/

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
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That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.

None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a dr-g — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.

When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.

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Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.
Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.

Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

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Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar. Evidence supports a few basic guidelines.

One: Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people. At Microsoft, new hires who spent at least a couple of days a month with their manager and their teams were more satisfied with their early experiences, which in turn meant they were more likely to stay over the next year and a half.
Two: Intensity beats frequency. The software company Atlassian has found that spending a few days with your team at a well-designed quarterly team gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily schleps to the office.

Three: Hybrid work is not one-size-fits-all. Different jobs require different amounts of time in person. So do different people; for example, flexibility proves particularly important in attracting and retaining women. And you need to gather together more if your staff operates like a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, rather than a gymnastics team whose members do their own individual events. (This explains why fully remote teams struggle to patent new technologies, but the people who examine patent applications are more productive when they can work from anywhere they like.)

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Four: Most people care more about when they work than where. If they can choose the hours, they’re more willing to let leaders pick the place.

Organizational policies shouldn’t be vanity projects. The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.

Last year, MC and executive leadership pulled the rug out from under remote employees on extraordinary ratings and promotions: line and middle management got the news in late October, all employees in November. Only those classified as hybrid or on-site were eligible (which turned out to be largely a dud anyway), while remote staff were punished with a geo-code demotion that completely ignored cost of living. Hundreds, if not thousands, of employees who put in ten months of hard work were denied both monetary and career growth, severely degrading morale across the company.

Given that the CEO, MC, and execs are clearly pursuing a strategy of squeezing employees into voluntarily quitting (via the GCC build-out and other tactics), the question now is: has anyone heard anything about what's landing in Q4? Trying to avoid ... Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...

Publicly traded company that relies solely on government health programs to make money. Trump administration has been moving to gut those programs membership over the last year and a half. Majority remote workforce viewed by leadership as expendable and easy to cut loose. Shareholders demand AI implementation. I really am sorry to people who will lose their jobs but…this all seems very obvious in hindsight doesn’t it?

Wasting 3-4 hours in car - just to tap badge , login logoff again on the meetings - really its counterproductive - makes NO sense in the year 2026...Well I get it Gunjan comes from old school industrial manufacturing background - This is really damage the bank on the long term - meaning less RTO ...Really

Is anyone else going extra days just to add a buffer in case tracking is wrong?

Where's "RTO is industry standard" guy? Probably carpooling with the "see you on the commute" guy. I'm sure that's a great conversation between the two.

Should we keep touting how much we make data-informed decisions around here? 8 and skate brah.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-25/more-people-worked-from-home-in-2025-despite-rto-mandates?utm_source=website&utm_medium=share&utm_campaign=copy

More US employees worked from home in 2025 than the year prior, a small but notable shift that suggests companies’ years-long efforts to get workers back into the office have hit a wall.

Last year, 34.9% — or 32.5 million — of full-time workers did at least part of their job at home on the average day, according to the latest American Time Use Survey published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics Thursday. That’s up from 33.4% in 2024.

CEOs across industries have demanded employees return to the office, trying to reverse a shift toward remote work that picked up during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the BLS data released today add to growing evidence that the pandemic-era paradigm shift is here to stay; the share of workers who work at home at least some of their day remains more than 10 percentage points higher than in 2019.

https://fortune.com/2026/06/25/return-to-office-ceos-ego-research/

I’ve been hearing rumors about a 3 days in-office requirement, with Mondays and Fridays remote. Any truth to that?

Fiserv has an opportunity to modernize how it thinks about work, productivity, and employee accountability.

The return-to-office model is being sold as “collaboration,” but for many employees, the actual workday does not support that claim. A large amount of the work still happens through Teams calls, emails, shared documents, workflow systems, and digital handoffs with colleagues, subject matter experts, developers, reviewers, and leaders who are spread across different states and locations.

That is not true in-person collaboration. That is remote work being performed from an office cubicle.

The issue is not whether employees should be accountable. They absolutely should be. The issue is whether physical presence is being mistaken for productivity.

Fiserv is a technology and financial services company. If the company wants to lead in innovation, artificial intelligence, automation, client service, and operational excellence, then it should manage employees by measurable outcomes, not outdated assumptions about “butts in seats.”

A better model would be simple:

Set clear productivity benchmarks.Set clear quality expectations.Set clear deadlines.Track cycle time, accuracy, responsiveness, client impact, rework, missed handoffs, stakeholder satisfaction, and risk reduction.Hold underperformers accountable.Reward employees who produce excellent work.Require office presence only when there is a legitimate business reason for people to be physically together.

That is a more mature operating model than blanket attendance rules.

Many employees were more willing to give extra time and discretionary effort when working from home because commuting was not draining hours and energy out of the day. When people are forced to commute to an office just to sit on virtual meetings with people in other locations, they become more protective of their time. That is not a lack of commitment. That is a rational response to an inefficient work design.

The company should ask itself a direct question:

What business outcome improves when an employee drives to an office, sits at a desk, and collaborates with remote colleagues through the same digital tools they would have used from home?

If there is a real answer, define it. Measure it. Apply it only where it makes sense.

But if the answer is vague language about culture, collaboration, or visibility, then the policy is not really about productivity. It is about control, optics, and habit.

Fiserv should not confuse visibility with value.

The future of work should not be built around where a person is sitting. It should be built around what they produce, how well they produce it, how reliably they deliver, and how much value they create for clients, teams, and shareholders.

The new CEO has a chance to reset this conversation. Not by eliminating accountability, but by making accountability smarter.

Measure the work.Measure the quality.Measure the outcomes.Measure the impact.

Then let high-performing employees do their jobs in the environment where they produce the best results, within legal, ethical, client, security, and compliance requirements.

That would be a real innovation culture.

The B levels in my dept all got fully remote status a year ago. And the C levels got an increase from 2 to 3 days in office. Anyone know why this is? I thought at some point C levels would get remote status too.

Finished a major project and they let the last remote guy go today.

Electronic Arts recently implemented new job cuts. Recruitment, customer service, security, and IT teams were impacted. The exact number of affected employees is not known. Some affected staff worked remotely in the U.S. and from the Hyderabad office. This marks a continuation of rolling layoffs for the company.

https://kotaku.com/ea-layoffs-fan-care-recruitment-hyderabad-2000708971

BisigSCAMno destroyed the company and made this place miserable to work for with Sapience and mandated in office hours, minimum 9 hours a day, five days per week.

Mike Lyons brought back some sanity by offering flexibility with pool of remote work days, number of required in office hours and getting rid of Sapience.

Takis was here working with both CEO. Does anyone know whether he's in the BisigSCAMno camp and will likely reinstitute rigid in office requirements to drive away our remaining talent?

Or is he sane and will likely leave well enough alone by leaving the current flexibility?

Or might be do something different?

Is he the type to care about such things?

Is there anyone on here who actually knows his mentality around these matters?

Where are all the posts about virtuals getting notices? It seems the people fixated on virtuals and their occupancy indicators have gone quiet.

"Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

"The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.

"Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining."

The Secret Reason Bosses Want Everyone Back in the Office, Every Day of the Week ~ NYTimes.
June 22, 2026

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.

None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a dr-g — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.

When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.

Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.
Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.

Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html?s

It is so frustrating to hear all about summer regionals, the importance of them bringing families together and continuing the culture blah blah blah. Meanwhile back in headquarters the minions are hard at work and all the fun and culture building things that used to exist are gone under PP reign. Too expensive, leave out the remote workers who chose to be remote, who get to work from home and see their kids during the summer, who get to wear sweats all day, no commute but the in office people can’t have any of the family connection, culture building activities they used to have. No bring your kid to work day, no real founder’s day-zip, zero, nothing. Oops, you still get the tricycle races which is more about the GPs participating and showing off than anything else. But make sure you know YOU MATTER.

Will Corp Risk eventually adjust back to 3 days in office once they get the numbers they need?

If you’ve been denied previously-approved medical accommodations, switched to remote status instead of having the accommodation approved as an alternative path forward, or if you experienced a lot of stress/difficulty/hardships this year from the disability accommodation process this year or previously, please upvote this post.

So USAA is doing corporate investigations on lower level employees for RTO, yet they keep hiring executives to be remote, how hypocritical is that? I submitted a JAR earlier today once I saw on LinkedIn the new Chief Information Security Officer is remote. My reasoning, my director is remote in San Diego, ED is remote in New York, a girl on my team remote in Hawaii, and another girl remote in New Mexico and a guy remote in Iowa. Yet I’m the only one in office (Charlotte) and I live in South Carolina, but since it’s only 58 miles and not 60, I’m told to be in office.

Vestis Services LLC filed a WARN notice in Pennsylvania. This action affects fewer than a dozen employees. The layoffs became effective June 15 and involve largely remote positions. No facility closures are indicated in Pennsylvania. The company does not expect significant impact on its Northeastern Pennsylvania operations.

https://fox56.com/news/local/vestis-layoffs-expected-to-affect-fewer-than-a-dozen-pennsylvania-workers

Tech CEOs often attribute mass layoffs to AI. A recent Gallup poll indicates only 1% of laid-off workers agree with this. Layoffs have stabilized at 21% after a significant increase since 2022. Remote employees are particularly vulnerable, comprising 25% of surveyed laid-off workers. Thirteen percent of laid-off workers were from the tech industry.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91560409/ceos-blame-ai-for-layoffs-workers-disagree

For all the people posting "just quit," I'm assuming you either have wealthy parents, a wealthy spouse, a trust fund, or simply don't understand that most American households rely on two incomes to keep the lights on.

The idea that people can "just quit" comes from a place of privilege. Many people can't simply walk away from a paycheck. They can't magically afford a maid, laundry service, extra childcare, or elder care to make RTO more manageable, or months of reduced income or no income on unemployment while they search for something new. And let's be honest—the job market isn't exactly making that decision easier right now.

What makes this especially frustrating is that many of us chose these roles over the last few years because they were advertised as remote or hybrid—not because we were specifically committed to one company. Changing the rules after people have built their lives around those expectations feels like a bait-and-switch.

So when people say, "just quit," what they're really saying is, "just absorb the financial risk and disruption to your life." That's easy advice to give when you have a safety net. Not everyone does.

The result isn't that people leave. The result is that you end up with a lot of frustrated, disengaged employees who feel stuck because they can't simply walk away.

And yes, it's hard not to notice that many of the people making these decisions have financial security and flexibility that most workers don't. It's a lot easier to tell someone else to take a risk when you're insulated from the consequences yourself.

Not to mention that the office setup, hot-desking, and commutes are terrible.

Am I getting paid for that commute time? No. Should I be? Probably. We all should be.

And let's not pretend there aren't real quality-of-life impacts. A lot of people use the flexibility of remote work to take a walk, go to the gym, attend a doctor's appointment, pick up a family member, or simply take a break that helps them manage stress and stay productive. When you're spending hours each day commuting to and from an office, that time disappears.

For many people, return-to-office doesn't just mean working from a different location. It means less time for exercise, less time for family, less time for errands, and less time to take care of their mental and physical health—all while doing the exact same work they were already doing successfully from home.

Has anyone had a situation where you’re taking care of a love one and need to work remotely? Does Nike allow this or would it be a case of you would need to resign? I’m the caretaker of a parent who is starting to require more care and I need to keep
My job, but also take care of a parent.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/17/opinion/remote-work-depression.html

What would happen if everyone just walked out on the day they started the return to the office and refused to go back till they put things back to hybrid or remote? I mean, if everyone left, they would have to negotiate with us... Cause I don't think they can fire everyone. Like, even if some of the other offices walked out in solidarity?

I know this is a fever dream, but they would be so sc--wed if everyone organized and pushed back on this.

Work From Home Is Here to Stay-Even if Some CEOs Don't Love It
Big companies keep trumpeting return-to-office mandates, but the amount of time Americans work remotely is barely budging. #WSJ 📰

The past couple of years have seen a drumbeat of big companies announcing, to great fanfare, that they were requiring employees to spend more time in the office. Home Depot, Target, Microsoft, 3M, Intel-the list goes on and on.
But across the broader economy, the evidence suggests that the return to the office has stalled out.
An average of 26% of paid, full days were worked from home in May, according to a monthly work-from-home survey run by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven Davis. That is down, but not by much, from the 27% registered two years earlier.
It was about 30% in 2022, when companies were transitioning away from the pandemic. But in 2019, before the pandemic struck, Labor Department figures show that about 7% of days were worked from home.
"The data does seem at odds with the Jamie Dimon story of the world, where remote work is dead," said Emma Harrington, an economist at the University of Virginia who studies remote work.
Instead, remote-work rates appear to have reached a new equilibrium, with far more people working from home at least part of the time than before the pandemic.

Other data tell a similar story. Kastle Systems, a security company that tracks access-card swipes, puts average workplace occupancy across 10 major cities just slightly higher than a year ago.
Cellphone data collected by technology company Placer.ai found that average office visits per working day in May were about 32% below May 2019 levels. In the same month last year, they were about 35% below that 2019 level.
The disconnect between the high-profile return-to-office mandates from some large companies and the broader data could in part be because, big as they are, those companies account for just a portion of the 163-million-strong U.S. workforce.

Work from home is hardly over. In fact, it's probably here to stay.

• Read more: https://on.wsj.com/44jueEB

Seems like many were told to work remote and there are update meetings again.

What’s the talk around here? I’m working remote so hard to gauge what’s going on in other departments here. Been here for more than 5 years.

I applied for a remote job here but was told it will actually be 4 days in office. Anyone have insight into how strict it is? Like is hours tracked

Hi Bank of America peeps. A few of us from Truist are checking in. Mike Lyons was just named our new incoming CEO. What was it like working for him during his time there? Solid leader? How did he handle culture, trust, accountability, and employee engagement?

Any flexibility on remote work or work-life balance, or was it more old-school in-office?
It's fair to say morale is quite poor right now, and many of us are looking for signs that things can improve with no expectations of instant miracles. Curious if you noticed any positive shifts over the longer term under him, even when changes got messy. Good, bad, or ugly, we'd appreciate hearing about it.

Hi PNC folks. A few of us from Truist are checking in. Mike Lyons was just named our new incoming CEO. What was it like working for him during his time there? Solid leader? How did he handle culture, trust, accountability, and employee engagement? Any flexibility on remote work or work-life balance, or was it more old-school in-office?

It's fair to say morale is quite poor right now, and many of us are looking for signs that things can improve with no expectations of instant miracles. Curious if you noticed any positive shifts over the longer term under him, even when changes got messy. Good, bad, or ugly, we'd appreciate hearing about it.

The June 15th rollout of RTO has occurred. Check your workday profile.
Looks like this batch (so far) included about 400 people out of the 4500+ in PA that work remotely still.
But don't worry, you will soon be replaced by the remote offshore employees.

When RTO was first announced, I thought I’d adjust after a while. That hasn’t really happened, and not just for me. A lot of people seem quieter, more frustrated, and less connected than before.

I’m in my early forties, and I’ve worked in enough places to know when the energy has shifted. This is one of those times. I don’t hate the job itself, but the current setup has made it much harder to stay motivated.

I’ve been browsing remote openings for the past couple of months. I’d rather find something that gives me a little more control over my day and doesn’t make work feel like such a drain.

I've got a week of WFH coming up (taking 3 half-day PTOs). To try to manage my burnout levels, I am thinking of getting a short-term rental somewhere nice and working from it for the week, rather than from my normal home office. I'm not sure if this is going to trigger any kind of monitoring that might cause a problem for me. Is there any known monitoring around what location you are connecting from?

Prior to the pandemic, when I had a full time telecommute agreement, I did this once or twice a year. My wife and I would rent a beach house or a place up in the mountains and hole up for the week. Still working but changing the scenery for awhile. It did wonders for my mental health. Never cleared it with a manager, just did it and never heard squat about it being a problem. But I haven't done anything like this since 2022, and given the way leadership has been flailing around about RTO and putting various heavy-handed monitoring in place, I'm not sure if it will still fly these days.

Any advice appreciated.