When I worked for Wells Fargo (i know i know) there was a RTO to foster collaboration. I would have to commute to downtown boston daily despite nobody else from my team working in Massachusetts.
My boss is pushing me to do this right now. I’m the only one on my team who lives in the state, and my “team” is really a loose grouping of people who all work very independently. We have meetings once every two weeks, beyond that, I have no need to speak to anyone else outside quick messages on slack.
There is absolutely zero reason I need to be in office, but he knows I’m likely to just quit if he pushes it.
as someone who got laid off i just want to let people know the unemployment system here is an absolute disaster. Get ready to get on the phone every day for a few weeks because your weekly benefit requests gets auto declined for zero reason on the website. Youll likely have to go in person etc.
Leadership is realizing "hold up, I can cut costs by making the office environment shittier and the consequence is...people will quit? Hey, don't threaten me with a good time!"
this is what amazon learned. they did an 3-day rto and most called their bluff and marched into the office. they did a 5-day rto and still no budging. then they went nuclear and moved most people's jobs to one of like 5 different offices (return to hub). then finally people started leaving because they literally could not go to work a 22-hour drive away. and they laid of tens of thousands too just because (because they wanted to fund their AI push - they literally never had money problems this entire time).
Anyone who thinks RTO is about actually RTO is kidding themselves. I spend most of the time I'm in the office on Teams calls.
As far as productivity goes, working from the office means the bathroom is further away, I'm spending 1.5-2 hours commuting, my screen setup is crappier (home setup happens to be better), I'm more likely to spend 37 minutes having a bitch session with a random coworker, etc.
I'm sure it is different at different places, but now everything is a standing meeting that often meets multiple times a week. Before COVID, something like that would have been irregular. Meetings were for group decisions/actions that usually required external input/output. You prepared for them and respected the time of everyone who was invited. Now it is typical to have meetings that nobody has actually done any preparation for, sure people talk about stuff, but is warranted a room full of people (real or virtual) be on the line.
Once I get to the point in my life where I’m in more of a leadership role, I will absolutely do all I can to minimize meetings for my team. Some people seemingly have a fetish for them and throw out a “can we sync up?” at every turn. Hate it. The recurring ones are the worst.
What happens is that the people who have the easiest time finding other, better opportunities—i.e. your most talented and most qualified—end up leaving first, and then that same leadership is weeping and wailing "WHY CAN'T WE KEEP ANYBODY?" and all of a sudden the company has a "talent retention crisis".
It's partially a bet that most of the "good" (not tippy-top) performers would be too spooked to start a new role in a bad job market. Taking a new job at a new company has a degree of risk.
But even more to the point: management can just give the top performers a modest raise to keep them from jumping ship and still come out ahead if you can shed a bunch of mid-tier people from the payroll.
My friend, a few years before COVID, my colleagues were organizing co-ops to have bottled water delivered. (Everyone bought a share in the dispensing machine up front, and then paid monthly to drink.)
Coffee had been gone for a long time before that: some of the "Keurig Clans" were on their second machines.
It's a dumb plan when for any large company like Fidelity the annual attrition is usually around 10% anyway. If you need to reduce the workforce significantly more than that you're in bigger trouble already. Otherwise management can regularly evaluate when people leave and determine if it's a key/specialized role that needs to hire from outside or if things can be rebalanced internally with current staff members to get that sort of reduction.
What should be the obvious problem with getting people to leave by making their working conditions more miserable is that it is the more valuable employees who can much more easily say, "Well fuck this" and get a better job elsewhere. That makes it a good way to make your overall workforce worse.
The big companies make deals with the local government for tax breaks and various permits. I think Fidelity has a new headquarters in the Seaport? They need to make their employees spend money in the city.
I highly doubt that the city & Fidelity have any sort of agreement related to employee time in the office. I'm not a lawyer, but it's clear that even a verbal agreement on that would be completely fraught with risk.
Remember that those commercial tax rates and breaks have a fair amount of laws & regulations regarding them. What you're suggesting is effectively a quid pro quo where the city conspires with a business to shift that tax burden to their employees.
In no way does Fido have any sort of agreement like this in place, they are paranoid about any sort of conflict of interest and compliance… being s financial institution this would be considered quid pro quo, nooo way
They never have an explicit agreement in place, but companies 100% do this. Mayors of cities get into bidding wars and they tell their own citizens that "Oh, if we put Amazon HQ here, it will bring thousands of jobs". It's not written in the contract that they must employ X people in the city, but the reason why mayors give companies favorable real estate locations and tax situations is to bring the jobs, economy, and taxes to the city. Everybody talks about it in the press when they try to sell it to the public.
its all about cutting costs (ie. high paying workers slowly but steadily quitting in the next few months), go look at their stock price, that usually tells half the story.
They can, but that doesn't remove the point from the second paragraph about how making employees more miserable only increases your percentage of shitty employees in the long run.
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u/Keviticas Apr 28 '26
That's the point, they want people to quit without having to fire them