#officeculture

If you go to the office in EP these days, you'll see plenty of pretty girls smiling and drinking coffee, and also ladies in hijabs walking laps. This place is such a joke.

EastTown MSP
6am?
5am?

Guys are in our building today moving out old furniture to get things ready for the final group coming back in! Good luck in getting a spot you like. Those of us that have been coming in for TWO YEARS have taken all of the good ones. Enjoy your final days at home!

RTO is here to stay, we all know that. I badly want to move states. Does anyone have experience with moving locations, how did that work out? I will report to the office to keep my job of course, but I don’t want to live in this location anymore. We have team members that live in other states and report to their office even walking in and working alone. I don’t see why I wouldn’t be able to change locations.

We were told every day is a drop in location at Bedminster. So why do people have personal stuff (including plaques) at "open" desks? Name plates also....

All on my laptop. But hey, good thing I'm at the office because...why exactly?

I don't know about other markets but here in Charlotte we have far too many people that are assigned to work in the Uptown area but use the Ballantyne office more than they do their assigned building in Uptown.

It's definitely, a pain in the rear because there is only a handful of drop in spaces on first come first serve. People who drop in, in most cases have no respect of their surroundings and talk loud and have conference calls on the speaker. Not to mention they use the drop in rooms all day as if its their office when it should be used if you need to be in a confidential meeting.

Not mention they don't clean up after themselves. I can go on and on but I do hope something gets done about it because drop in people think just because someone that has a assigned seat and isn't in the office that day , that they are privy to use that space and/or remove some of their equipment to another workspace.

I actually hope the WPE applies to being at your assigned building for the minimum days.

Where is everyone? I thought we were all 5x8 RTO. Maybe all took vacation.

Is there a way to disable the stupid Bny default background. Having to reset our background every 20 minutes is annoying, wish they would let us at least have windows default backgrounds at least. Who the he-l wants to look at the pillars as their background.

In the office alone again — just me, my badge, and the hum of lights that definitely don’t need to be on.
If I miss a day, I get put on “a list,” so I’m hanging on like a badge clip that’s one tug from snapping.

Meanwhile, the remote “leader” who is well within the RTO distance — but somehow got reclassified as remote — will probably need to set up a Teams meeting to talk to me about the importance of in‑office collaboration.
Peak corporate irony.

And the highlight of the month: after six months of coming in four days a week, I finally had my first in‑person meeting.
Pretty sure someone got forced to schedule it.

At this point, I’m basically the last survivor wandering an empty office park, trying not to end up on a list. But don’t worry leadership is listening, if we are lucky maybe some are thinking as well. 🙏

Have a great weekend and remember the holiday doesn’t count as a swipe next week.

I need to get back to work since I was asked to hire more remote workers for my team, who will never come in this office.

ASM

Someone I know was let go for continuously clogging toilets in Biggs. I was told this by someone on the People Team that would know. And no they didn’t clog them the way you think, but rather they were caught flushing wads of paper towels and plastic ware from the cafeteria. Very strange and she didn’t go into details how they knew it was person, but they were able to nail down who it was. Has anyone else heard about this yet?! Apparently the perp was doing it for a couple months and then got really brazen when they started dropping spoons and forks in the toilets.

currently in office experiencing our culture sitting next to someone who got RIF’d while they spend all day on zoom with other RIF’d teammates discussing next steps

I always go into the office expecting the worst but this is a new low

So what are the core hours you are supposed to be in the office? Execs have a tantrum if it just so happens people are in a meeting in another room or they are walking in at 8:30 and no one is in yet. What is the expectation?

What is the culture like inside Artisan in the different offices?

Milwaukee
Los Angeles
San Francisco

horrible culture for sales and supporting groups

On the PCS call Q&A, someone asked,

"Asking again when leadership will be investing in updating the hubs. We go into hubs that are filthy, filled with stains, mold, broken fixtures, mice, bed bugs, and fraying carpets. Employees are always sick. It's a health hazard. Do we need to report to OSHA? The NFL? Media? What will it take??????"

Courtney's response was essentially that they can't improve the sites because there are "over 300" of them. The real estate panic was enough to justify keeping those 300+ sites, but not enough to keep them in a decent or clean condition? Nobody is asking for the royal treatment, just to not work in dirty and broken offices every day.

Credit to her for answering it at least. Maybe the realization that it could be made public was a motivation.

Pre-WFH, I've had two managers who obsessed over start times and break lengths. Neither of them actually knew how to lead. They just watched the clock because it was easier than doing their real jobs. It never improved productivity, but it worked for them. Those are the kind of people who want us back in the office. To hide their own failings.

I’ve been loving the open-plan HMP setup and how much it’s boosted real collaboration, but I feel like we’re leaving some upside on the table. A lot of the private offices were only supposed to be temporary, yet plenty of people (especially in Subsurface and the old CTC groups) are still camped out in them long-term. It’s starting to feel like the last holdouts keeping us from going full one-team.

If we accelerated the rollout and moved everyone into the open plan, it would be a game changer. No more closed doors creating little silos. Just full visibility, spontaneous conversations, and everyone including our geologists and reservoir engineers ... mixing it up with the rest of the business every day. That kind of constant collaboration would help us move faster, share knowledge better, and really crush the competition.
Management has already shown they’re willing to make bold calls on workspace. Speeding this up and finally transitioning Subsurface out of those temporary offices would send a strong message and unlock even more of the culture and performance gains we’ve been seeing.

Chevrons heading in the right direction. Let’s finish what we started and make the open environment the standard everywhere. Anyone else think it’s time to push harder on this? Especially curious how the field and ops folks see it when you’re in the office. Would getting Subsurface fully into the open plan help with handoffs and alignment, or am I off base?

Of course it’s not about collaboration. But companies are worse than pre covid with the on office stuff. I know someone at another company that said a senior manager sits by the door to see who is leaving “early”. Like 5 minutes early. Seriously what is going on? All the big companies are doing it. Spending money monitoring stuff that you thought went away in the early 2000s.

Me and the boys completed our first week of the old badge switcheroo. It was a wild success!

We take turns holding everyone else's badges. Then, the one holding the badges goes into the office and scans everybody else in. It works like a charm!

Now, each of us only goes in once per week!

We are already talking about ways to make it better. We are open to your ideas!

Hearing different rumors about Summer Friday’s this week.
WFH every Friday over the summer, two weeks of your choice to WFH. and up to your department head about coming to office Fridays.
Any truth of any of these?

Ever coming or we hybrid now

My team is in a different office, and I’m the only one at another site. With full-time RTO, how are people approaching this when it doesn’t impact team collaboration?

I want to work from home tomorrow, but I don’t want to miss my mighty badge swipe

I love coming to the office to see everyone (including me) play on their phones.

Sitting in AT&T's open office today. No assigned desks. Five day mandate. "Collaboration" is the official reason.
The reality: complete silence. Cold shoulders. Headphones. Everyone either annoyed or running on fumes. The only conversations happening are between people who already knew each other before they got here.

Forced proximity is not culture. It never was.

McElfresh posted about collaboration last week and got 403 likes from 130,000 employees. The open office told the truth he won't.

And for the person who always replies "see you on the commute" congratulations. You've perfectly summarized what AT&T calls culture.

Two hours of traffic. A hot desk with no name on it. Headphones in. Eyes down. And a COO posting about collaboration from a corner office while the rest of us perform presence for a badge reader.

This is what market-based culture looks like from the inside.

Work for a satellite office, don’t see much of a difference. Are they just tracking badge swipes at worst? I highly doubt this is enforceable across a 50k employee base

Went in-office for work today, and thankfully no one showed up so I can conduct my virtual meetings in peace. Happy Mental Health Awareness month!!!

Can we not do better here? If you want people in the office, maybe push a vacuum or dust once in a while? Office is so filthy we itch when we come in, cups and coffee are few and far between. No working water dispensers in any floor currently. Reserve space covered in grease from prior persons lunch…Thanks USBank for return to office bacterial frappe :(

I see people bragging that they badge in, have a coffee and leave. That is not return to office and is in violation.

If you want to work remote, that is your choice but work remote with a different company. I go in at least 3 days, some weeks I go in all 5 days.

Starting 9/26 employees are told to be in office 5 days per week. No doubt BNY will follow the same mandate as they they are always in lockstep with the other financial companies.

https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/04/29/business/fidelity-return-to-office-five-days-boston/#:~:text=Fidelity%2C%20which%20employs%20more%20than,immediately%20after%20the%20Great%20Recession.

Buckle up!

I think it’s time we revisit who owns reserved parking spaces - too many open and not enough general spots

We’re almost at a year of return to office and I still don’t have a desk. Anyone else?

It seems most building offices are constrained for space and with the recent return to office, it has made hiring in locations almost impossible. Are they going to open up new buildings are get leases for locations constrained?

Which office is the worst?

Heard rumors that HR is attempting to come up with a system to ensure everyone is spending 8 hours in the office.

Anyone else can confirm this?

Until now it seems they screen for badging in the office. This of course completely leaves out all the evening / weekend calls and booting up vpn on the laptop to resolve issues (sometimes for several hours), not to mention when you need to be in the house for the occasional service but can definitely work from home very efficiently.

Why even ask this question and upvote it, what did you think they’d say, 4 hours? The real question was are they tracking hours in order for it to count as an office day.

Hour long meeting full of insults. The idea that working in office will foster conversation and innovation is, as someone else has said, a fat load of kwap. There are SO many reasons for why this isn't going to go well on the 4th, but I don't want to beat a dead horse.

I'm just tired, man.