#worklifebalance

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.

I’m so stressed I’m having nightmares and daymares about me dying at my desk or turning into that Brendan Fraser movie The Whale. I think I might have to look elsewhere sooner that I thought. I was gonna holdout longer but I don’t think it’s a good idea

I am sick to my stomach after hearing "more updates to follow in coming weeks" day after day.

While I try hard to not let this BS affect my productivity, it's becoming harder to focus

Nothing happening this week or next, company is moving forward preparing for kick off , no layoffs

it’s 2am on the east coast. I’m wide awake knowing 8am will be here before I know it.

I’m dreading another week of “hey! how are you?” “I’m good! how are you?” “let me share my screeeeeeeeen.” can we just not.

I don’t want to talk to anyone and it’s not personal. I’m too much in my own head to even think about anything outside of “okay, what do I do now?” I don’t want to discuss projects, strategy or give my thoughts… NOTHING. let’s regroup mid-August.

I feel like those of us who remain should be given extra sick days ‘cause I truly am sick of this nonsense and we know it will get worse.

I hope everyone has a good week. at least it’s a short one.

Are you still employed at the bank? What happened to you?

Serious answers only

Silly question that I probably know the answer to but for those taking the VSP do you think Centene would wipe our computers and let us keep them? It’s so much better than my personal computer lol.

Is there a minimum hrs required to be present in office during your in-office days? How is this followed in various locations

Fortune 500 bosses demanding staff return to the office share one trait: Narcissism, research finds

https://finance.yahoo.com/small-business/articles/fortune-500-bosses-demanding-staff-070000467.html

Just got a RTO related email outlining ground rules which included packing up all of your stuff if you plan to be in meetings for an extended period of time. It's bad enough not to have a permanent desk, but being expected to vacate a desk during the business day is beyond ridiculous. If you want me in the office, I need an actual space to work.

Got a job offer to work there. What's the culture like in that office?

The managers I’ve dealt with always sound condescending, micro managing, and pushing extra hours.

Are they trained like this? Cause they su-k

Walking around the place with so much positivity and high hopes. None of them have any clue that the rest of us are bitter, angry and mostly dead inside because this company su-ks.

sick of this nasty working environment

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?

I guess my night time gummies are day time gummies now.

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.

Hi there, the company I worked for has been bought by Accenture. What can you tell me about Accenture? Is it a good place to work? Flexibility? Overtime? Career plan? Salary? Etc.

I joined this industry a decade ago bright-eyed and excited to write code and implement solutions. Now everything is just AI. AI this, AI that. It's utterly soulless. I'm seriously considering going back to college and switching to a different field or something.

Whenever we get a few weeks of peace, I still can't breathe properly. The anxiety is constant these days since I know what's coming eventually. This is not a healthy way to live.

I’ve been in the workforce over 30 years ( including 16 of them at US Bank) and I’ve never encountered this level of micromanagement where salaried professionals are treated like they’re hourly employees. This is not meant to disparage anyone hourly at all but being on salary has typically meant you aren’t tracked on an hourly basis. You are trusted to be mature and professional enough to manage your time and perform your job and if you aren’t getting your job done, you get fired. You are evaluated based on your overall performance not based on where you’re sitting and for how long. Simple.

This just boggles my mind because it’s so draconian.

Bumping from @aq+1kt7a1e2m.

I've learned that when you go above and beyond for a company that sees you as a number, you're only hurting yourself. They won't reward you or remember the extra hours, the extra effort, and the extra stress you put yourself through. None of it changes anything. So stop doing it. Do what you're paid for. Nothing more, nothing less.

Anyone have experience with doing less than 8 hours in office? I am required 8 hours in office 3 days a week. I am not in any customer facing role, everything can be handled over a teams call, I don’t “collaborate” in person. Other than this requirement I mostly like my job.

I don’t think my manager cares either, as long as I am not “flagged” in the system. And he gets notified he needs to chat with me..

I know the new requirement was a hard 8 hours in office. Originally I did that. But occasionally I have done 6 or 7 hours in office and haven’t heard anything from my manager, I don’t want to push it too much.

I am wondering if anyone has insight on what the limit is? Or how the system works?

Optional Background:
I can comply with being in office and not coffee badging, sure. But the strict 8 hours in office, especially coupled with an over an hour commute including traffic is tough. That is 2 hours a day commuting, and then maybe an additional hour needed to wake up and get ready in the morning. Sure it’s doable, but that time really adds up. And if it’s not necessary…It’s also difficult to be flexible and meet with offshore team members in the early morning or late night.

Being able to do 5,6,7 hours helps a lot to bypass traffic and manage time better. Any insight please?

Does anyone know the trick to keep teams status green, even if you are curled up in the fetal position on the floor?

RTO is absolutely driving me crazy. I'd quit tomorrow if I could afford it, but since I can't now I just keep hoping they lay me off.

But I'm yet to hear that anybody found it. That's how bad it is out there. And that's the main reason why not just Verizon, but most of the companies can currently get away with treating their employees like cr-p. There's literally nowhere else to go for the majority of us.

I read this forum and it seems like everyone hates this place. But I don't. I'm not thrilled with the uncertainty, but I genuinely enjoy the work. I hope I can keep doing it. Is there anyone else out there who feels the same?

" spend time with your family take your kids to that soccer game"

Also DF: let's Implement "productivity" tools and surveil our employees.

How productive are you the last 2 weeks? Are you able to focus or get anything accomplished? Are they actually watching what we are doing at this time? In her email Tanya McNally wrote "For our people leaders, our ask is to afford your eligible team members the space and time to contemplate whether the VSP makes sense for them".

What is being said there?

They are a failing company thanks to their own doing. Offshoring to India is going to run it into the ground even more. All they care about is the money they line their pockets with. There has been a steady and steep decline to every company that GP touches- in all realms. Profitability, benefits, work life balance, employee retention and satisfaction, etc.

Why wouldn’t gp cut McKinsey loose at this point? It’s known that consultants throw spaghetti at the wall and hope something sticks. But thus far, nothing has even marginally improved by retaining them.

I certainly hope gp is shopping around their vertical markets to sell to keep gp afloat. I do not foresee gp being around for much longer at the rate things are going

Well said, @bm+1kt6r66mv.

The amount of stress this company has caused in the past year to me and my colleagues is unbelievable.

They expect us to work as if everything is ok, while hearing every couple of weeks that someone is laid off.

Today has been an especially difficult day, and I can’t focus on anything. Supposed to leave on holiday on Monday, not knowing whether I’ll have a job to return to.

Not worth it.

Rumors of a sick out on the system?

I hate that phrase. I am so tired of it. Anymore leaning in and I’ll fall over. Fall over I guess really means burned out.
Ever notice how meetings begin with gratitude and then ask us to do more? Like it’s up to each one of us to fix the culture that rotted from the head prior to Hemsley’s return. There comes a point where the boat can’t right itself and I’m not talking about financially— they’ll fix that. It’s the purpose, drive and passion for your profession they can’t restore because they broke it and don’t even know it— or at least refuse to take ownership of that fact. Still, we lean in, we are met with gratitude, take more surveys and in the end it’s just the same sad thing over and over. Take your PTO, turn off your phone, hug you wife, husband, kid or neighbor. That’s my advice

https://www.wsj.com/articles/ceo-pay-2025-d2885ea3

[Didn't quote entire article text, just extracted AK's info. from the interactive table in the article].

AK ranks 34th out of 392 CEOs on the list:
Total pay: $38M
Pay Change: +51.1%
1-Year Return: 38%
Median Employee Pay: $49,630

Waiting with bated breath for my 51% raise this year!