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Associates being able to collaborate across time zones and optimize their productivity with flexible hours is especially relevant for global organizations.
Work-from-home can indeed reduce commute time, improve work-life balance, and potentially increase efficiency—provided the right communication and collaboration tools are in place.
Heard a rumor of 3 days/week and possibly 5 days/week starting Jan 1. Haven’t seen anything from corporate. Everything has been heresy. Teams are gonna fold. WFH works. We’ve been able to release the new online banking to 11 million customers while mostly WFH and during a pandemic. Tech buildings are chaotic with numerous distractions. We’ve said it many times, open floor concept does not increase productivity. It does the opposite. PUSHBACK PUSHBACK PUSHBACK!!!
Well said, @67a+1k4tc23cn.
I had my first meeting about this yesterday, and I’m here to tell you that it’s very real. My manager reported my average active hours over a period of time and my team’s average active hours for comparison. Since this was the first meeting, no guidance was given on what to do/not do based on my numbers.
What isn’t clear, and wasn’t provided to me despite asking, is exactly what activity is being captured, but based on the numbers, I have to presume it’s some combination of engaging with applications and being active on Teams calls. Ironically, what wasn’t captured was the quality of my work during the same time period. And before any assumptions are made, my role is fairly senior. I’ve been with Wells for a long time; I’m not in a call center or ops type position. I can’t be any more specific than that without risking anonymity.
So yeah, this is the next phase.
It’s obvious who coasts through long lunches and so-called meetings (what gets accomplished again?) and who does the work, makes repeated sacrifices and worries if the next mandatory town hall will be their last.
This is my first time witnessing a layoff. I recently graduated college and just joined the job market lol. I was lucky and got to keep my job but I’m having a very hard time getting back to work and “prepping for peak”. Do we really just have to go back to working like nothing happened? And specially during the busiest season? Surely they thought about how this + the production freeze would decrease productivity….
Work smarter or let the id--ts do the works. Razor focus on getting richer than the id--ts next to you working harder.
https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-teams/microsoft-teams-is-about-to-become-your-boss-lapdog
This zero-innovation management team would be gone yesterday, and employees at all levels (management are also employees) who think spending 8 hours a day being in an office building translates to 8 hours a day of productivity would be culled in favor of those who understand 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort.
Effective employees avoid the other 80% of effort because it's almost always useless. AI could hold an earnings call and draft a better earnings email than any of the current management team. It would certainly sound more professional than WF's Chief uhm-ahh Officer.
I understand tools like Copilot help pick up the pieces. But, That’s insane to say.
New building has so many wide open spaces, but no practical place to do work. Why can't every desk have an ergonomic chair and monitors? Pretty sure the couches, benches and cushy chairs outnumber the actual workstations.
No logoff entry defaults to 8 hour network login
My laptop is so slow ALL THE TIME and WF makes it so difficult to get a new or better one. What laptop model do you have and does it work? Any tips?
I've been RTOing for a while now, and it still feels pointless most days. My work gets done the same as when I'm home, just with more noise and random chatter I don't care about. The constant interruptions make it hard to focus, and the commute eats up hours I’ll never get back. And for what? I still can't figure that one out.
As long as management is quick to take credit for a firm’s successes but equally swift to blame its workers for its failures, no surefire remedy for low productivity can be expected in American manufacturing and service industries.
Because there are so many useless teams like QPOET which have been doing NOTHING for so many years!
Can somebody name one thing that's better now than it was before layoffs? I'll wait.
When a company focuses on badge swipes/RTO mandate, instead of employee productivity and project/work outcomes, they are doomed to be left with robot employees that offer no loyalty, no creativity, no passion, and no team spirit. Best of luck Ford. Merge with another company that knows how to treat their employees, before it's too late!
The merger of the orgs is s disaster
Tools were not ready for the extra users
SEs are not well trained
Figures are terrible
Not enough SE coverage
60-90 minutes devoted to commuting.
Coworkers constantly stopping by to chat about non work related things.
Leaders encouraging team lunches that last an hour.
Scrambling to find private space for sensitive calls.
I’m hitting my time but getting a lot less accomplished. But I’m at my desk. That’s what matters, right?
Does anyone know how the keystroke and activity monitoring reporting is going to work with PTO? If it’s taking an average does it not consider when you are on PTO (so not working that day/several days)?
To produce to the full capacity I’m capable of with all the noise going on here. Why doesn’t management recognize that the environment they have created is toxic? I hate getting up in the morning to come here and that was never the case.
After each round of cuts I stopped doing something, whether it's the overtime or the extra polishing that used to matter to me. At first I fought to keep standards up, then I realized it was nothing but self punishment. Now I guard my time and try not to let the job eat me, and I make sure to do just a bit less after every round.
J&J have had employees working from home since COVID in 2020 and they are still working from home up to now. These employees are working side jobs and working on their home renovation projects while getting paid from J & J. It's time for J & J to do some housing cleaning. These are non-essential, none value added employees. They can be let go and this will save the company millions of dollars.
There are enough locations that IF Hertz allowed scheduling based on performance 100% rather than longevity having any merit to a schedule, then you would have your money driven top performers taking the most transactions lately resulting in a revenue surplus.
What grocery store has their oldest cashier who is not efficient just because they’ve been with the company for a long time?
Or do we continue paying these over paid hourly employees to resolve little to no revenue which the company is scraping to attain to pay the positions that are duplicated, tripled, top heavy…
75K still overstaffed or just nice? employees still overloaded or simply inefficient and unproductive?
It’s been two years since AT&T blindly followed Amazon into the RTO disaster. And for what? Nothing’s improved… morale, productivity, retention, all worse than before. The only thing that’s gone up is burnout.
Since then, almost no one else has moved to 5x RTO. The vast majority of major companies are still hybrid because they see the damage this kind of policy does to reputation, to employee engagement, and to the bottom line.
And to the guy claiming “5-day RTO is becoming the industry standard” - no, it’s not. It’s been two years, and nobody’s joining this sinking ship. No other major company in the industry does more than 3 days. You’d have to be completely delusional to believe otherwise. Or maybe you just think we’re a tech company. LOL.
Ah the results of RTO are upon us!
Look at all that productivity!
That’s a 20 Billion dollar loss. Way to go Stankey and BOD!
Not close. It's a smart idea. AI can automate repetitive, manual tasks like data entry, scheduling with speed and consistency. This reduces a company's labor costs. Senior workers can increase their own productivity and focus on higher-value activities. AI can also train the "would be" junior employees into becoming more senior employees.
Actual d-mbest things: how about replacing remote work arrangements with RTO5? And RTT? And RTH? And then complaining that launches are too slow? And violating the rights of disabled employees? Shame!
It’s here just to push out as many people as possible on the cheap. If I’m wrong, convince me otherwise. Give me one example of RTO actually improving collaboration, efficiency, morale, productivity, anything, really. All I’ve gained is more time wasted commuting and higher expenses. I balance out the idiocy of RTO by making sure I’m not available after hours. None of it makes sense unless you see it for what it is - a way to make people quit.
Genuine question - Does anyone even find themselves productive in the office? Not here to rant - actually just genuinely curious. My in office days are filled with trying to tune out an outrageous amount of noise and side chatter about sports, etc. (people playing mini golf in the aisles, solving puzzles). How is that collaborative when it comes to a work environment? I have to struggle to tune out the insane amount of noise and random people coming up to my desk to talk in order to actually get my job done properly. I get ten times the amount of work done at home. So frustrating.
Whatever veep or c-suite mo--n enabled this team should start looking for a new job.
I’ve been in claims for nearly 3 years, got a pretty good schedule where I work task work the entire day, I do my 5 task an hour, takes me like 15 minutes, I click my mouse multiples times so no idle shows up, and then I just play video games for the the better part of the day, and I know a lot of people are gonna come bi--hing and moaning about my post but idgaf lmao, I have a small community of people in SF that do the same, I was really into the work for the better part of 2 years and realized being remote there’s no opportunities to move up and now I don’t think I want to if there was an opportunity, I’m just gonna milk the system until I decide what I want to do next. Gonna learn how to use this FMLA and STD before I do up and quit. Cheers!
I worked from home 100% for over 4 years. I got a lot done, and surely even outperformed many on-site people. Even got top achiever over on-site people one year.
That being said, returning to office has forced my output to probably triple over WFH years.
My job can easily be done remotely, but being in office introduces almost daily instances where I get pulled in to solve issues outside my normal day to day "expected" duties.
I already knew I wasn't going above and beyond most years at home, I was doing just enough so my boss never even had to watch my work output.
Being on-site my boss now questions if I'm going to burn out from everything I'm always getting pulled into/voluntarily taking on.
The looming layoff threat is surely an additional motivator over "quiet quitting" years, but Elon was speaking facts about WFH just not being the same.
**I'm sure there's some who have a role where they stare at a screen all day and feel it makes zero difference to RTO, but you would really have to be working in a silo if you haven't taken on any extra work with RTO.
Five months later, Duolingo hasn’t laid off a single full-time employee, and is instead using artificial intelligence to bolster the productivity of the humans it does employ, co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn said at the Fast Company Innovation Festival 2025 on Tuesday.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/17/duolingo-ceo-how-ai-makes-my-employees-more-productive-without-layoffs.html
Not literally, but it sure feels like it. I can’t sleep the night before, my blood pressure is through the roof all day, and the stress makes productive work impossible. I know I’m not the only one who’s less than productive on these days. Instead of dragging it out and losing productivity constantly, why not have one major round every six months and let us work normally the rest of the time?
Job Hopping Is Out, Job Hugging Is In for Fearful Workers
Employees reluctant to give up job in today’s rocky job market
Callum Borchers
Sept. 3, 2025 9:00 pm ET
They don’t seem happy, they don’t give 100%—and they don’t quit.
Cranky workers are clinging to the jobs they have instead of moving on because, well, what’s the alternative in the current economy?
The extra pay that typically comes with joining another company has practically vanished. Disengagement is so widespread across the U.S. and global workforces that cheerier pastures are hard to find.
And resigning without a plan feels more reckless now than in the good old days (2021). Back then, you could get by on pandemic savings and stimulus money, live the #vanlife for a while, then watch your inbox fill with interview requests from businesses on hiring sprees.
How times have changed in just a few short years. Today, employees are unwilling to risk change and simply go through the motions. The number of Americans quitting their jobs, and the openings available to people looking for work, continue to decline, according to federal data released on Wednesday.
The trend of staying put out of fear is known as “job hugging,” a sharp turn from the job hopping of recent years.
Like a bad penny
This is a new headache for employees, bosses and the economy writ large.
Go-getters hankering for promotions might lose out if mediocre co-workers refuse to vacate the next rung on the corporate ladder.
“When people were moving during the Great Resignation, that allowed others to get promoted, perhaps ahead of schedule and have a stretch job,” says Alan Guarino, vice chairman of consulting firm Korn Ferry. “Now people can’t move up and they potentially get demotivated because of the lack of opportunity.”
Managers, meanwhile, were only a short time ago complaining about low retention rates. Now, there might not be enough healthy turnover to reinvigorate their teams.
Leaders usually have ways of managing out unwanted employees. There’s “quiet firing,” basically sidelining someone to underscore the writing on the wall. Another favorite tactic is a performance-improvement plan.
“Truthfully, being put on a performance-improvement plan means, ‘We do not want you here,’” says labor attorney Kim Cramer. “That sounds really harsh, but in my experience, performance-improvement plans are not meant to help the employee.”
Instead of taking the hint, though, more people are riding out their employment as long as it lasts. In recent weeks, Cramer has had a surge of clients ask her to review their severance agreements after being terminated. She estimates 60% to 70% of them knew they had fallen out of favor a while ago but didn’t leave.
Exceptions to the rule
The prototypical job hugger is a drag on the team, but not all are like that. Some are average contributors or even high achievers.
Doug Yakola, a former McKinsey senior partner who is now an independent consultant, notes many workers no longer take an up-or-out approach to their careers. Instead of leaving for a bigger title and greater responsibility when they hit a ceiling, more people are willing to remain in neutral if the pay and work-life balance are decent.
A tech worker I’ve known for 20 years is in this position. He sees no upward mobility and resents his employer’s rightward political turn. But he earns well and has a sweet, hybrid schedule that affords ample time for hobbies. He keeps putting in a good-enough effort at work because the job, though unfulfilling, serves its purpose in his life.
B-teamers like him can be valuable to companies that can’t realistically expect everyone to be an all-star, Yakola says. This is especially true at businesses like the ones he advises, which often need turnarounds and aren’t exactly magnets for top talent.
“I actually like job huggers in a weird sort of way because I can’t replace employees very easily, and I need to keep the experience,” he says.
There is also a strain of type-A job huggers. They reached the upper echelons of their organizations but feel blocked from the very top. They are disillusioned yet too risk-averse to break away. And it’s not in their DNA to slack off.
“I work with somebody who hates being a lawyer but she’s amazing at it,” says Alisia Gill, a former corporate HR chief who coaches midcareer women. “She cries in her car every morning before she goes to work, and then she goes in there and does her job because she doesn’t know what else to do.”
Gentle shove
In cases where a company wants someone to leave, but the person keeps hanging on, firing seems like the obvious solution. But managers say they would much rather have an employee leave voluntarily.
It’s often cheaper, since businesses might owe severance pay to people they let go. A resignation spares the boss an awkward conversation. What’s more, it can preserve relations with the rest of the team. It’s easier to manage people whose friend took another opportunity than it is to lead employees whose pal you just canned.
Research by University of Chicago economist Virginia Minni suggests a relatively simple strategy can help nudge job huggers toward the door: reflection.
She and colleagues studied roughly 3,000 white-collar workers whose employer put them through a series of exercises to suss out their sense of purpose. Overall productivity increased for a few reasons.
“This actually encouraged some people to leave on their own,” Minni says.
While others found better-fitting roles internally, being forced to confront the drudgery of their jobs was enough to make a bunch of low performers quit.
So, if you are hugging your humdrum job and your boss strikes up a philosophical conversation about the meaning of life and work, you’ll know what’s going on.