#rto

Here’s hoping the RTO scares off the fossils so the rest of us can finally grow

Is anyone else hearing whispers of five days a week next year?

In Corp Risk and a few people have mentioned hearing that rumor over the past few days.

Don’t look now, but it looks like the first shoe dropped . A major federal case on telework just found that RTO for telework was uncovered as illegal and exposed for its real intention of a way to force workers off payroll. Since being laid off a little over a year ago I’ve worked in Washington knocking on doors and exposing the flood of workers from India that transpired prior to this flood of layoffs, and exposing AT&T for targeting older workers in some of their most critical and vulnerable years of working. I’ve made a lot of headway in pushing for more obstacles of this flood of workers from abroad to replace the American skilled labor. I’ve just begun with that, but this recent legal fight has just begun. While this current case that was just won singles out the RTO trick that was played on Government workforce workers, this may have a trickle down affect in the private sector. When companies like T do things that were illegal, it greatly reduces the effect of that , “no sue” paper they forced you to sign or forgo you earned severance. That’s also another thing I’m working on with my talks to senators. This little game that T has waged against the workforce should be exposed for what it is. I encourage that the ones who were impacted by this game T played with past layoffs and the upcoming layoffs with no cost to T be exposed. If you were wrapped up in this game please take some time to sit down and send an e-mail to your local state leaders especially in places like Texas and Georgia. Don’t give up just because people from upper management kicked you in your teeth. Transfer your mobile, internet and other communications to less expensive providers, make sure you hit up “friends and family” about cheaper services as well. This is the impact to the company when they abuse its older vulnerable workforce. I know from inside sources that more layoffs are upon us prior to entering the holiday season, hang in there, don’t give up, and know that your targeted voice to you local state elected leaders matter.

Can we carpool?
Can anyone share the severance plan?
Can I buy PTO out of the benefits enrollment period?
What will my bonus be?
What is up with RTO?
Does anyone have dirt to share with the news?
😏

Our team just announced a restructure and shifted people around and not replacing a Director who jumped ship. Another sloppy decision from a mediocre leadership team. Sinking ship here in SLOD and all we focus on is RTO

There's going to be waves of people leaving in September when the RTO policy goes into effect, and when Executive Leadership(ELT) realizes the reduction in payroll expenses isn't quite hitting the goals set by TPG, they are going to do mass layoffs. Entire departments will be eliminated if not reduced to a skeleton crew. High cost centers like Product Development will probably see substantial cuts, simply because most of that department live more than 30 miles away from an office, they're not going to cover relocation fees so it's easier to just cut. We are already seeing hiring freezes in PD when long-tenured software engineers left with no backfilling, budget constraints is the excuse given. I estimate that there will be massive RIFs in mid-October through December, then they will probably announce it in January 2027 just like last year.

I got laid off last year which was the best thing that has ever happened to me.

What has been happening since then? Is RTO still strict 5 days a week? Are they still tracking hours?

Bad news for RTO trolls on this site. Joe Russo just confirmed the RTO policy is "not a top down one size fits all" policy. He said he encourages everyone to talk to their managers to see what they need to do to be most effective in delivering business outcomes. He also hinted that more company real estate sales will continue.

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.

Asking for a friend who is expecting an offer.

Is it 2 days per week ? Or can done 4 days a week and skip full next week ?

Are there any min hours in office requirement ? Or is coffee badging ok ?

Is anyone’s office Management not enforcing RTO 5 days a week? My office, people come and go, no one ever works a full day, and bosses still let people work from home whenever they need to. Meanwhile I am in there everyday working a full day, full time schedule. WTF is going on with this company??? Total joke of a place. I heard some managers definitely not enforcing this new policy.

Just the "Sustainable Operations," section alone is one big fat joke. Yes, continue to brag about your NetZero initiatives, meanwhile, drag people into offices they really have no business being in, forcing them to consume natural resources they otherwise don't need to, and create even more pollution and road congestion. Oh, and don't get me started on the fact we're seemingly moving another 10k jobs to a country that uses 4.3 times more coal for electricity generation that we do domesticly.

In my location nothing has changed. Desks with names printed on paper are still empty? So what was the point of this useless exersise other than to take away the last flex day for the de-valued teammates required to be in desks 40 hours? I hope leadership doesnt expect their gaslightling attempt to boost morale. Empty desks with a green circle speak for themselves.

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?

Leadership seems to need a decoder to comprehend the results, so here it is. The negative survey results are not about healthcare perks or wellness programs no one uses, they are only about RTO and the lack of flexibility.

“I am proud to work at AT&T”

Once true. No longer. Public perception has deteriorated, and when people outside the company hear about the five-day RTO policy, the lack of any real collaboration, and the absence of assigned seating or co-located teams, the reaction is disbelief. Pride erodes when policies feel performative instead of purposeful.

“I would recommend AT&T as a great place to work”

That answer is now clearly no. A mandatory five-day RTO policy for roles that historically had been remote before COVID and can be done more effectively remotely is an immediate dealbreaker for modern workers. The policy alone makes the company undesirable and uncompetitive as an employer.

“We trust the leadership decisions”

Trust is broken. Employees do not support the financial decisions that destroyed value, nor the RTO mandate that ignored clear employee feedback. Trust cannot survive when leadership consistently doubles down instead of course-correcting.

“The company provides opportunities to support career growth”

Opportunities are narrowly concentrated in Dallas, with limited mobility elsewhere. For a national company, that is a self-inflicted constraint that unnecessarily caps growth and retention.

“Our policies and systems support me doing my best work”

They do the opposite. The five-day RTO policy actively reduces productivity, and many internal systems remain outdated and inefficient. Physical presence does not compensate for structural friction.

“The company cares about my health and well-being”

Employees feel burned out, mentally and physically, largely due to excessive commuting and rigid mandates that add stress without any benefit to the company or the employees. Well-being is not addressed by pushing unused benefits or wellness messaging while ignoring the root cause repeatedly identified in feedback.

“Do you feel changes have been made as a result of prior surveys”

No. In fact, the opposite. Employees explicitly opposed three-day RTO in the last survey, and leadership responded by increasing it to five. Feedback was not just ignored, it was contradicted. The disappearance of the prior third-party McKinsey survey results only reinforces that perception.

Did I miss anything else?
The pattern is now set and clear. Instead of addressing the core RTO issue employees are raising, leadership deflects with ancillary benefits and BS messaging. That approach feels like gaslighting, and not listening. So why should I even bother taking the next one?

If leadership truly wants different survey results, the solution is not another manifesto email, benefit rollout, or talking point. It is addressing the one issue employees are consistently, overwhelmingly, and clearly raising.

Flexibility. Trust. Results over “presence”.
That is the message of the survey, whether leadership wants to hear it or not.

Sorry to ask this here but are contractors required to go to office 3 days or there is no in office monitoring for contractors?

The water cooler talk was bubbling today! The newest tidbit - Abigail was surprised about the RTO pushback in the pulse survey.
No word on where she's been over the last few years with survey results but apparently you all raised the roof and she is surprised.

Everyone has been ordered to RTO… Nobody said you had to go INSIDE.

Welcome to the Parking Lot, Suite 2026.

BBQ grill next to the company-issued laptop.

Burgers at 11:47 AM because “lunch meeting.”

Tailgate chairs for the 9 AM Zoom.

Beverages in the cooler labeled “Q4 Financials.”

Wi-Fi mysteriously works better next to the smoker.

Productivity is down 87%, but morale is at an all-time high.

HR: “Why is everyone working outside?”

Employees: “We’re embracing the company’s return-to-office initiative.”

HR: “Why is there a grill?”

Employees: “Team building.”

HR: “Why are there 37 folding chairs?”

Employees: “Collaboration.”

HR: “Who brought the co-----e set?”

Employees: “Leadership.”

At this point, the parking lot isn’t a parking lot.

It’s a corporate tailgate with benefits.

Welcome back, everyone. Please remember to badge into the building before returning to your assigned folding chair.

There are absolutely times when people should be together, but in reality those times are few and far between. If the work actually benefits from being face to face, great. Get everyone in the room and get your sh-t done.

But that’s not what 5x RTO has become… We’re tracking badge swipes, building dashboards, calculating hours and obsessing over whether someone’s a-s was physically in a chair for eight hours. All for… what?

So people can drive to an office, put on headphones, open Teams and work remotely from the office?… Seriously, what the fu-k are we doing?

If my entire day is Teams calls, emails, spreadsheets and work with people sitting in different buildings or different states, then forcing me to commute to do it from a cubicle isn’t collaboration. It’s pointless theater.

I could do the exact same work from my house just like I did for a decade before Covid. I’d get more done, I’d be less burned out, and AT&T wouldn’t have to waste money supporting the office just so somebody can say we were “present.”

Bring people together when there’s a reason to be together. Stop confusing physical presence with productivity. They are not aligned.

If the end result of 5x RTO is that I commute an hour to sit in a building and work remotely from my desk, then congratulations, you did it (and nothing else)!

Way to go baldo! You just reinvented working from home - with traffic. What a joke!

Just wonder if anyone has any creative ideas to get around RTO or is Management helping by bending the rules?
Best of luck in the new school year Folks !!!!

Having to waste more than two hours on commute is certainly not making me more productive. What it is making me is resentful and slow and absolutely unwilling to go the extra mile, something I used to do all the time. I'm betting you RTO will turn out to be the biggest productivity ki-ler.

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 ✌️

Anyone moved to Dallas this summer?

Average hours report is broken and they apparently can’t fix it.

So enjoy WFH for the rest of August. If anyone asks why you weren’t in the office, just point to the inaccurate report.

All you need to say is “I was there.”

Can’t argue with the bad data when they’ve already admitted it’s bad.

Funny how we’re expected to trust these reports when they want to enforce RTO or terminate headcount, but when the report doesn’t work, suddenly nobody can figure out how to fix it.

5x RTO: powered by a spreadsheet that doesn’t know where anyone was. Pure genius!

Rumor around HQ today is that easing the 5x RTO policy is actually being discussed and could be on the horizon. If true, it would be about damn time.

The employee feedback has been clear. The commute is draining, morale is in the toilet, productivity has drastically decreased, and the policy is making AT&T less attractive to the exact talent it needs to retain.

Rumor is leadership is finally realizing that forcing everyone into an office five days a week wasn’t the brilliant strategy they thought it was.

Nothing is official, but if this actually happens, it would be a pretty big admission that 5x RTO went too far.

Anyone else catching wind of HR cracking down on the required hours in office? I heard a rumor of a VP having a discussion with some salary ACs and told them 8 hours in the requirement. 1. Why are they literally bringing down the hammer? 2. I’ve never once stayed longer than 6 hours in the 6 years I’ve worked there. 3. Why are salary workers being mandated to stay for a certain amount of time? You’re paying them to do a job; not to do something for a set amount of time. I’m so sick of this bs. How can HR be okay with something for YEARS and then decide it’s no longer OK to leave early. Loosen up the handcuffs a little, jfc.

What happens next year or in two years? Will the bank eventually care a little less or still fire people for not complying?

Part of the American dream is to get a job and earn an income. In reality this job is costing me more than the income can provide because of a RTO policy that the executives can’t even bother to acknowledge a single question about. (Remember the Q&A admin was removing them during our town hall) .

3 months in to this ridiculous RTO and I have spent so much money just to make ends meet. Daycare costs, a second vehicle just to get to daycare, gas, additional insurance, and time away from family have put me in the red week after week since mid May. Retirement contributions will probably stop soon. I have about 4 vacation days remaining because I had to use so many just to handle personal life. I never had to do that while remote. I can’t remember the last time I sat down and had a home cooked dinner with my family. Not a single executive is struggling from RTO side-effects. Regardless if their position is in-person only. They get the chauffeur and a security detail, if not they get a fat paycheck that makes up the difference. We are struggling. We are burning out. We are in debt. We are on the brink of collapse. Town hall was circlej3rk session about stock performance and a 5 minute q&a where we learned about one of bills favorite books. Recent tech all hands avoided questions like the plague. If you can’t provide us answers and solutions to your own policy then why should we comply? We will sit out RTO and become more productive doing what we were doing in our remote lives. We must band together and sit out as a whole.

Side note — stock price doesn’t reflect workplace morale/efficiency/product quality.

Is it still tracked ?

😂😂😂😂 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!

Would that work to not comply with new RTO and drag it out as long as possible till they terminate me or lay me off. Would this set me up for a possible layoff package and I could get unemployment benefits?

Anyone have any anecdotal information on people leaving due to RTO. I know a few people that have but nothing outside my business line.

If the workforce collectively refuses to sign the promissory notes or buy into the new Class B LP structure, the firm's engineered restructuring playbook faces a critical roadblock. Management cannot easily absorb the capital shortfall, leading to a predictable sequence of operational and financial outcomes.

1. The Buyout Capital Shortfall

The entire structural transition relies on employee debt to fund the exit package for the retiring founders and legacy General Partners.

• Frozen Payouts: If associates refuse the loans, the capital pool remains empty. The legacy partners cannot convert their illiquid paper wealth into upfront cash.
• Failed Restructuring: The firm cannot execute the internal leveraged transition as planned, leaving the aging ownership stuck holding the risk of a declining asset.

1. A Fast-Tracked Outside Private Equity Fire Sale

Because the owners are determined to achieve liquidity and exit the asset, a failure to sell the firm internally will trigger an immediate pivot to outside buyers.

• Abandoning the Narrative: The "employee-owned" corporate narrative will be completely discarded over a weekend.
• The PE Handover: Management will quietly initiate an aggressive fire sale to a predatory Private Equity (PE) firm or a direct corporate competitor. The old partners will accept a lower valuation just to get cash, handing the remaining skeleton crew over to an outside management team focused strictly on radical cost cutting.

1. The RTO Surveillance State Backfires

The harsh 4-day hourly tracking and the removal of family flexibility were designed to cause "controlled attrition" to thin out payroll liabilities before the transaction.

• The Talent Drain Acceleration: If employees reject the equity offering, the hostile environment loses its only theoretical financial incentive.
• Operational Collapse: High-performing and specialized workers will exit rapidly, leaving the firm as an hollowed-out operational shell that can no longer sustain its client base or defend its valuation to lenders.

1. Technical Default on Bank Covenants

The commercial banks funding the baseline operational loans operate under strict financial covenants tied to firm revenue and margin stability.

• Margin Compression: If productivity collapses because the workforce is disaffected and shrinking, the firm will miss its near-term financial targets.
• Bank Foreclosure: Missing these metrics triggers a technical default. The lending banks retain the legal right to step in, seize corporate assets, remove the Managing Partner, and liquidate the firm's intellectual property to recoup their cash.

1. Increased Internal Hostility and Cash Freezes

In a final, desperate attempt to force profitability metrics into alignment before the timeline expires, the lame-duck Managing Partner will shift from incentivization to absolute financial pressure.

• Total Cash Compensation Freezes: Annual cash bonuses will be entirely eliminated, and baseline salaries will be frozen indefinitely under the guise of "restructuring headwinds."
• Data-Driven Layoffs: A third or fourth round of aggressive terminations will be executed, using the 4-day hourly tracking logs and AI adoption metrics as a paper trail to eliminate headcount without paying severance.

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.

I realize these types of questions get asked a lot. Searching for previous posts is ok but usually yields a variety of responses that made it difficult to determine the actual policy/practice.

Before I got laid off no one was enforcing 8 hours in the office for 3 days a week. So I went in for a bit then did most of my hours at home because I had literally no co-located coworkers.

Is there reporting now that shows if you left early to finish at home? Is it still 3 days a week (this role I applied for is in CSBB).

Assuming there's at least some leeway with Dr appts etc I don't mind being in office 3 days a week. But I thought I heard rumors of 4 or 5 days in office for some groups before I got laid off - usually investment employees.

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.

Wow Bac invests 250 billion on various entities. Also partners with India finance company. Thanks for working your a-s off as the company looks elsewhere . Don’t forget to follow the new RTO rules.

Since we follow the lead set by the big banks, is this next for us?

“Bank of America changes up work-from-home policy for all hybrid employees.

Bank of America is enforcing a new post-COVID policy where hybrid-eligible employees are no longer allowed to work remotely on back-to-back days, the Charlotte-based financial giant confirmed Wednesday.

This means Bank of America employees will still have flexibility with three days in the office and two days working from home, but remote days cannot fall on consecutive days, such as Thursday and Friday or Monday and Tuesday.“

The remote and wfh accommodated employees are not having to deal with any of this BS. Isn’t that discriminatory to able bodied employees? They are making more money ,too, not having to commute, etc. I mean no wonder morale is so low! People in office are tired of the whole thing. We are not all playing on even turf. People that do the exact same job are required to be at 60% or more while the majority are at home raking in the savings! Boooooooooo! US Bank has some issues that need to be addressed asap!

4 days and 6-6 schedules didn’t push as many out