Unfortunately, this wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. I've heard seemingly unsubstantiated rumors of this for a while, but they've been from different people on different teams/areas, so they clearly heard it from different sources. That lends itself to the idea that senior leaders are already discussing it as a possibility or inevitability and that the information is trickling down.
I expect that we (USAA employees collectively) will go through the same "stages of grief" that we did with the initial RTO push: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
"I don't think they'd actually do this, it would hurt employee morale."
That's denial. There's no way they'd actually do this, think of employee morale! Pulse surveys say that employees want flexibility! They have never and will never care enough about Pulse surveys to back down on a decision like this. The only types of Pulse survey action items they may take action on are things like, "Our computers aren't powerful enough" or, "It would be nice if we could get some snacks in the work area." They're not going to back pedal on RTO because employees are complaining. Full stop.
"I can't believe they'd do this! Let's tank Pulse surveys and make our voices heard on Slack!"
That's anger. Employees are going to get angry, lash out, rant on Slack and on here, and generally make their feelings known. As we saw with RTO 1.0, this will do nothing. We can cry, scream, and protest all we want, but the BoD/EMG will do nothing. Once the decision is made, it's made. You can scream into the void all you want, but don't expect it to do anything.
"How strictly is this going to be enforced? Can I be exempted? What about a JAR? Maybe if we continue to push back, they'll reverse the decision."
There's your bargaining. No one is being exempted without extreme, undeniable circumstances. No one is getting a JAR approved because of anxiety, needing to care for a loved one, inconveniences, or anything else of the sort. If/when this announcement is made, ~99% of employees will be forced into compliance or managed out. They already have turnstile reports in place to track in-office attendance. All they need to do is tweak some settings and they'll be able to immediately tell that Jane Doe only spent 6.95 hours in the office on Thursday, or that John Smith worked from home on Wednesday.
"This su-ks. USAA su-ks. I'm still going to come in, but I'll be looking for another job."
Depression. From senior leadership's perspective, it's smooth sailing from here. The initial shock and turmoil have worn off. People aren't happy, but they've resigned themselves to the fact that this is how things are going to be. They'll still make snide comments and passive aggressive memes, but they've lost their fervor.
"Well, seems like every other company is enforcing RTO. This isn't a uniquely USAA problem."
And finally, acceptance. Employees have adjusted to the new normal. They've figured out all of their life's "trivialities" like child care, elder care, schedule conflicts, and everything else that gets in the way of their life's true purpose: sitting in an office chair for seven hours per day, five days per week.
Here's what else is going to happen:
EMG will claim that this isn't an attrition push. That's a lie. Laying people off under the current severance package is extremely expensive. It's far better and cheaper to push people to leave of their accord.
EMG will claim that this is for collaboration, to reinvigorate USAA's culture, and other PR-approved blurbs. That's also a lie. As long as the Baby Boomer generation continues to hold the majority of senior leadership positions, optics beats productivity. In their eyes, it's better to have someone in the office dressed in business casual giving someone a firm handshake than it is for that employee to be at home actually cranking out high quality work.
Unlike Wayne, I predict this new CEO will not take kindly to or allow open dissent. Expect channels like #memes-n-things to get shut down or otherwise nerfed.
Expect productivity tracking software to make its way to FTEs. It has already been piloted on 3P to ensure that USAA is "getting what they pay for," so it's only a matter of time before they turn it on for all employees.
There will be lots of talk of mass attrition, but that won't happen. USAA leadership knows that the job market is bad right now and they are taking decisive, opportunistic advantage of that.
Layoffs will continue, hiring freezes will be frequent, and employees will continue to be expected to do more with less.
I expect that any benefits we currently have that are "above industry standards" to be reduced. I'm not going to list them out, but some of our benefits are still far beyond the competition. Since USAA is no longer competing on a national scale like during the pandemic, they can cut them to be comparable to employers in San Antonio, Tampa, Colorado Springs, etc.
I sincerely hope I'm wrong about all of this, but this isn't my first time around the block. We are the frogs and USAA is the boiling pot. It feels like every decision being made by those in charge — both inside and outside of USAA — is a retaliatory action for the comfort and flexibility we all had during COVID. They need to remind everyone who's really in charge.
Boomers never got to work from home, so neither should we. They had to commute to an office to work their entire career, so why should we get to stay home or have flexibility? After all, the only way you know you put in an honest day's work is when you're sitting in bumper to bumper traffic on the way home from the office.
They justify it by pointing to the grandiose home office we already have, but fail to recognize that that is the sunk cost fallacy at play. If they wouldn't spend the money to build another office just like that, it doesn't make sense to continue to use it as justification for in-office work.
They justify it by claiming in-person work improves culture, yet slash any benefit or perk that made USAA's culture great to begin with. Not to mention the fact that everyone commutes to an office to sit on the same Zoom calls and Slack threads that they were at home.
And to be perfectly clear: This isn't so much a complaint about working in person. The vast majority of jobs require in-person, physical presence (healthcare, retail, manufacturing, etc.). As far as offices to work in, the USAA home office is about as nice as it gets in terms of amenities and creature comforts. The primary complaint is that we have a generation of people who can't convert a .docx to a .pdf running the world. They simultaneously push for AI/technology to replace human workers while demonizing the very technology that enables people to work from anywhere.