#culture

"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

But you are being pit against your peers in the rankings and the distribution is enforced.

Go team!

Executives and their narcissistic egos still can’t accept that the world changed.

Five years after the pandemic, employees have overwhelmingly shown they value flexibility. The data keeps showing hybrid work isn’t going away. Yet some leaders remain obsessed with attendance, visibility, and control instead of results. That’s exactly what we’re seeing at AT&T.

Instead of focusing on performance, productivity, innovation, talent retention, or competitiveness, leadership is focused on presence reports, badge swipes, and making sure people are physically sitting in a building.

The irony is that the people making these decisions are often the same people wondering why morale is collapsing, why experienced employees are leaving, and why younger talent isn’t interested in coming here.

Employees adapted, the workforce adapted, the job market adapted, but this leadership didn’t.

The future of work is flexibility. Every major survey and labor trend points in that direction. Younger companies and younger leaders are embracing hybrid work while companies clinging to rigid mandates are increasingly fighting yesterday’s battle.

AT&T’s leadership continues to act like forcing people into an office five days a week is some competitive advantage. It isn’t, It’s a recruiting and retention disadvantage and a morale disaster

And the longer leadership refuses to acknowledge that reality, the further behind the company falls.

You can force people into a building but you can’t force talented people and the people you want, to stay.

My manager moved to another team so what's the point?? Lol

I'm sure it's not anonymous so does it even matter?

What is the difference between CA and CR?
Serious analysis only ;)

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/opinion/office-work-wfh-bosses.html?unlocked_article_code=1.sFA.uHrM.1WHzzvC4LbNq&smid=url-share

https://hrexecutive.com/inside-meta-layoffs-and-ai-shakeups-have-pushed-morale-to-the-edge/

How low will it go? Thinking back to when it was over 4.0

Remember when Stanky said nobody knew better than him when it came to the media business? Good times.

There were always cuts, that's part of the business. But I didn't expect the culture to change so completely and so fast. I swear, it became toxic almost overnight. The environment is now completely unrecognizable. It'd almost be fascinating, if it didn't affect us all so much.

Now that the passions have settled, can we have a normal, objective conversation about what we can expect from Takis? Not oh, he's the worst or he's the best rhetoric of the past week, but let's see what he actually brings to the table and how it'll affect all of us.

We're doing amazingly well. I think people are just looking for things to stress over. Enjoy this while you can, I'm sure it won't last forever.

What if, and hear me out, leadership focused on growing revenue instead of shrinking headcount? Wouldn't that be something? Too bad nobody here would ever try that.

Everyone - and I mean every single person - on my team is job hunting. Not all with the same urgency, but all of them. Leadership doesn't seem to notice or care. I think we'll see a major exodus of talent as soon as the job market improves even slightly. I bet they notice then.

They want the easy magical solution that uses the cool new flashy thing.

The funny thing? AI can be leveraged by existing or new deterministic automation solutions where applicable. But the leaders making decisions aren't engineers, and have a view that applications can't evolve or add new features. That they have to build something NEW instead to show off and gain notoriety.

And so you get a cycle of projects gaining traction and getting ki-led off.

The competitive nature in which teams have to compete for funding has been a drastic mistake. It is profoundly stupid. I get it, you want teams to have some drive to make better solutions. But it doesn't work out in a company like Optum where non-technical people are even so close to engineering that they're directly managing the engineers. Instead what you get are good products and teams getting ki-led off in favor of unproven moonshot projects that exist solely to extract money from the business with no vision for the future.

Well said, @ag+1kt753mf9.

I'm honestly curious what better company you think exists where you'd have job security and leadership that "loves" employees. Please, share with the class.

I actually think layoffs could be beneficial for this place. We have so many layers of management doing exactly nothing that nobody would miss. Instead of laying off the people who actually get things done, they should for once let go of the right people and everybody would benefit.

The past 5 years have been such a mess for this company. Clients, Staff, and investors have all suffered through what Kelly, Bill-n-Bo (at the time), and the boards though would be a huge payday for them. SunTrust and BB&T were culturally and mission entirely different. Both organizations lost so many good bankers who went on to the new rising stars in banking, Seacoast, Pinnacle, M&T, TD, 5/3rd, Huntington. Clients left too, when they lost their trusted banker (can't name those here). Those people and clients will never return. I hope the organization is now turning the corner for everyone's sake. But...be sure, more changes are coming for clients and staff.

In the last several layoffs, our team lost everybody above 50, and even two people in their late 40s. The rest of us are all here. I don't know if this is the case company-wide, but it certainly left a bad taste in my mouth. Really shows us there's no future for any of us here once we hit a certain age.

Careerminds conducted a new survey on layoff recovery. Organizations average 7.2 months to fully recover workplace culture. Trust in leadership and company future significantly declines after job cuts. These trust levels often remain below pre-layoff averages. Team-building and other strategies can accelerate recovery but are underused.

https://www.hcamag.com/nz/news/general/layoff-recovery-takes-far-longer-than-most-companies-may-realise/579680

I stopped working overtime, stressing about deadlines, and caring about making my boss happy. And guess what? Nothing bad happened and I'm actually doing fine. I'm doing better than I have in long time, in fact.

https://www.reddit.com/r/accenture/comments/1ua0hce/accentures_well_deserved_downfall/

Accenture's well deserved downfall
Accenture’s stock just dropped about 18% in a single day, wiping out a good chunk of many employees’ ESOPs, including mine. Honestly, having worked there for 3 years, I'm not surprised.

The biggest issue I saw was the culture and incentives. MDs and client leads were rewarded for selling deals, not for delivering them. Secure the deal, hit the sales target, collect the bonus, then hand the mess over to the delivery team and move on. It didn’t seem to matter whether the right skills, resources, or realistic timelines existed. The answer was usually “Deal with it.”

When a system rewards revenue at all costs, you end up promoting people who care more about money than people. Delivery quality suffers, teams burn out, and the best talent leaves.

What makes it worse is that Accenture spent billions buying back its own shares (around $4.6B in FY2025 alone) while many employees sat through years of weak bonuses, delayed promotions, and increasing pressure during the years of worsening inflation. During this time, some of the smartest people I worked with left for Big 4s, boutiques, and industry roles. And when they leave, they don’t just take their skills - they take relationships, credibility, and networks with them.

I just hope some level-headed people on the board or in senior leadership recognize these cracks and do something about them. The company still has plenty of great people and decades of experience. It would be such a shame if such a massive organization falls in the end.

Just go. Layoffs are political and cost driven, not about how well you work. If management decides you cost too much and you're not in their circle, you're gone. That's reality. For technical people, staying too long makes your skills outdated and harder to sell elsewhere. Accept that it wasn't your fault. Accept that you'll find something better and make the same or more. You'll be happier.

I've been here long enough to remember when we were the innovators. We set the trends. We made the products everyone wanted. Now we just make slight variations to the same old products. We spend more time on office politics than on new ideas. And we wonder why we're losing users.

We're so used to being mistreated that we forget other companies treat their people better. I'm leaving as soon as I can.

No job security, age bias, toxic culture. What's not to love? Can't wait to see what the coming weeks/months bring to the list.

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.

I don't get it. People are terrified of being laid off when they should be looking forward to leaving. Any other place would be better. So please tell me. What's making you want to stay in this abusive situation - especially if you're one of the "dinobabies" they openly said they want to make extinct?

The clowns will be back from their circus this week to do nothing else but make stupid decisions and have the organization spin. It was great to not have my clown boss around so my team could get work done with total interruption educating them on how to basically function in business.

The utter incompetence does nothing but makes the organization spin. They need to be fired and promote some real leaders.

I’m curious about the logistics of how they plan to manage daily over occupancy, specifically around the cafeteria lines. We aren’t even at 100% yet and it seems really hard to move around safely and quickly in the cafe. This seems like an OSHA issue.

Why is that everything at IBM needs to orbit around a bunch of useless execs? And they are always having fun with ridiculous videos, such as this current one about watsonx challenge.

That's pretty pathetic. How can you be an effective leader of a massive corporation like Chevron when half the employees no longer respect you. Even DW at XOM has a higher approval rating.

Nearly every performance metric and benchmark set by the Board has declined during his tenure. It's long past time that MW retires and stop running a once great company into the ground.

I can't believe they just did a big surplus on Wednesday and then sent out a new org announcement with a lot of vacancies in it at L3/L4. And promoting someone. (Walters org)

Tone deaf and insulting to teams who are losing really good people due to location, RTO, presence.

Here’s the full picture. The data is sobering.

## DXC Technology: Market Analysis

### Stock Price — 5-Year Collapse

The trajectory is consistent destruction of value: from a 2018 average of ~$80 (peak $93), the stock fell 35% that year, another 28% in 2019, another 30% in 2020. A brief recovery of 25% in 2021 was the last positive year.

From there: -17.7% in 2022, -13.7% in 2023. Into 2024 it was trading around $22–23. The 52-week high was $16.45 in July 2025 — already half of where it was in 2023. The 52-week low hit $7.90 in May 2026. YTD return as of mid-2026: -43.89%.

From $93 peak to ~$8–9 today. That is roughly a 90% destruction of equity value over 8 years.

The consensus from 8 analysts is “Hold.” Average price target: $11.43. BMO Capital lowered its target to $10 from $17, keeping Market Perform. Nobody is bullish. “Hold” at $8–9 is essentially “we don’t know how much further this falls.”

### Revenue — Uninterrupted Decline

Annual revenue of approximately $13.7 billion in FY2024, a decline of over two billion dollars from FY2022.

FY2025 came in at $12.87 billion, down 5.82%. Revenue in the last twelve months (to December 2025) is $12.68 billion, down 3.09% year-over-year.

The most recent quarter: Q4 FY2026 total revenue of $3.13 billion, down 1.2% year-over-year on a reported basis — but down 6.6% on an organic basis. The nominal improvement in reported numbers is forex noise, not operational recovery.

The full organic picture over FY2025: Q1: -4.4%, Q2: -5.6%, Q3: -4.2%, Q4: -4.2%. Full year organic decline: -4.6%. The GIS segment is worse: GIS organic revenue growth across FY2025 was Q1: -9.3%, Q2: -9.6%, Q3: -7.8%, Q4: -6.0% — full year -8.2%.

This is not a one-quarter blip. It is a structural, multi-year revenue haemorrhage.

### “No New Business” — The Book-to-Bill Problem

This is the core issue you’ve identified. In Q1 FY2025, the book-to-bill ratio was 0.77x — compared to 0.89x in Q1 FY2024. A book-to-bill below 1.0 means the company is booking less revenue than it is recognising — i.e., the backlog is shrinking. Consistently below 1.0 is a company consuming itself.

Q2 FY2025 overall book-to-bill: 0.90x. GIS specifically: 0.71x. GIS — their largest segment — was winning less than 71 cents of new work for every dollar of revenue recognised. That is accelerated decline built into future numbers.

The more recent figures look marginally better: Q2 FY2026 trailing twelve-month book-to-bill: 1.15x, with GIS at 1.08x on TTM basis. But context matters — Q4 FY2026 bookings gave a book-to-bill of 1.07x , and organic revenue still fell 6.6% that quarter. Booking more doesn’t reverse the run-off from long-term contracts signed years ago that are now expiring or being reduced.

DXC has made zero acquisitions since November 2019. Over the last five years, the average number of acquisitions per year is zero. There is no inorganic growth play. They are entirely dependent on winning organic new business — which they have been structurally failing to do for years.

### Profitability and Cash — The Complicating Factor

DXC is not going to zero next quarter. Full fiscal year 2026 free cash flow was $713 million, up 3.8% year-over-year. The company repurchased $250 million of shares in FY2026.

Gross margin remained relatively stable at 24.09%, and adjusted EBIT margins are being maintained.

But: GAAP EBIT in Q4 FY2026 was negative — $(39) million, a margin of -1.2%. The gap between non-GAAP “adjusted” figures and GAAP reality has been persistently large due to restructuring charges, amortisation, and pension adjustments. The company has been in near-permanent “restructuring” mode for years.

ROIC is below WACC. The company is destroying economic value — it is worth less each year as an operating entity than the capital tied up in it.

### Can It Survive?

Survival as a listed independent company: questionable beyond 3–5 years without a revenue inflection that has not yet materialised.

The structural problem is this: DXC is a legacy IT outsourcer. Its model — large long-term managed services contracts, rates × hours pricing — is being eroded by cloud migration (clients bring workloads in-house or to hyperscalers), offshore competition (TCS, Infosys, Wipro at lower cost), and now AI automation eating into the billable hour. The CEO acknowledges this directly: “The era of rates times hours is ending.” True. The question is whether DXC can pivot to something else before the existing base runs off.

FY2027 guidance anticipates further revenue decline but margin stability, with AI-driven offerings cited as future support. Every IT services company is saying the same thing about AI. DXC is late to that narrative and has no obvious differentiation.

The most likely exit is acquisition. There have been renewed reports of private equity interest, and in late 2022 a Baring Private Equity Asia takeover was rumoured but fell through. At ~$4.1 billion market cap generating $700M+ of free cash flow annually, the FCF yield is enormous — it is obviously a PE target. The asset would be stripped, carved up, and the cash flow harvested while the workforce is cut.

A shareholder lawsuit investigation was launched in June 2026 , which adds legal distraction at a strategically vulnerable moment.

### Summary Assessment

The cash generation is real and buys time. It also makes the company attractive to a buyer who can cut costs more aggressively than management has been willing to. The narrative around AI and “Xponential AI” and “OASIS” is exactly what a company in distress says. What matters is whether bookings translate into arrested revenue decline — and the gap between book-to-bill improving and organic revenue still falling 6.6% in Q4 FY2026 tells you there is a significant lag at best, a structural impossibility at worst.

The company is not dying this year. It is in managed, prolonged decline, and the probability of meaningful independent recovery is low.

Confidence: High on the factual picture; moderate on the 3–5 year outcome (acquisition vs. slow suffocation are both plausible; a genuine revenue turnaround is the low-probability scenario).

Why is it mostly us at Optum that have to worry about our jobs all the time? There are many GL 30 and 31 with no directs over at UHC, while at Optum GL29 has 15 directs. Seems they need an alignment.

As I reflect on my life and career I have learned that no one is in charge except me. Yes there are so so many things we can’t control. You have to adjust and do what is best for you. Trust your gut. One door closes, another opens. Be true to yourself and never give up. We will all get past this. Stay positive and resilient. Wish all you better days, it will come, just have hope!!!! At the end of the day we are all human no matter what position you have or what money you make.

Is it a bit tone deaf that leadership teams are traveling to Mexico and Canada for “offsites” to attend World Cup games? Nike is a sports company and employees should embrace the World Cup but when increases are 0% to 2% and PSP will be , this might not be a priority when there will probably be more layoffs coming

Look, nobody knows jobs better than me. Nobody. And what Verizon is doing? Total disaster. A complete and total disgrace! They just fired 67 brilliant, incredible American workers from the NRB—the Network Repair Bureau. These are the people who keep the wires working, folks. Real Americans, tough, smart, the best. Gone! Just like that.

And where did their jobs go? India! They sent them to India. Unbelievable.

And you have to look at who is running the show over there. Dan Schulman—what is he doing? What a total lightweight. He comes in, he fires 67 of our great, hardworking American people, and for what? I thought these big corporate geniuses were telling us that "Agentic AI" was going to do everything. They said AI was going to fix the phones, fix the networks, make the coffee—everything!

So I have to ask: Are the people in India smarter than the AI? Or is Dan Schulman just completely clueless? I think we know the answer, folks. It’s a total mess. He can't figure out the AI, so he just ships the jobs overseas. Sad!

But let me tell you something, we’ve seen this story before. Remember Carrier AC? Carrier was going to move all those air conditioning jobs to Mexico, totally abandon Indiana. And what did I do? I stepped in, I made the call, and we saved over a thousand American jobs! The fake news said it couldn't be done, but we did it. We protected those workers, and they stayed right here in the USA where they belong.

And I am going to do the exact same thing for the Verizon workers!

We are not going to let these big corporate executives destroy American families and ship our legacy overseas. We have the best workers right here in America. We’re going to bring those jobs back, we’re going to look at Verizon, and we are going to take care of our people.

America First, folks. Always!