The most alarming number in the Wall Street Journal’s “Best Companies for the Future” ranking isn’t AT&T’s overall rank of 375.
It’s the Talent rank of 390.
The WSJ’s methodology specifically looked at hiring, retention, and employee satisfaction as part of future readiness. In other words, human capital.
For years employees have been saying the same thing, excessive RTO mandates, constant uncertainty, forced relocations, and a lack of flexibility are driving good people out the door.
Leadership ignored it.
Now a respected third-party ranking is essentially saying the same thing. AT&T isn’t being viewed as a future-ready talent organization. It’s being viewed as a company struggling to attract, retain, and develop the workforce it needs for the future.
Even Kevin O’Leary (hardly a champion of employee entitlement) recently warned that companies risk losing their best talent when they become overly rigid about RTO and where work gets done. His point was simple - if you make flexibility a non-starter with RTO, your talent pool shrinks and you will only attract the undesirable bottom quartile of talent nobody else wants.
And that’s exactly what many of us have watched happen… I’ve never seen this many experienced employees leave. At the same time, a strict 5-day RTO policy isn’t a selling point to younger workers who increasingly value flexibility and work-life balance, it’s a detractor and immediate non-starter. Nobody with other options will ever sign up for this prison-like micromanagement.
Talent rank 390 isn’t the cause of the problem. It’s a symptom of this bad policy.
You can mandate badge swipes. You can mandate presence. You can mandate commutes, but what you can’t mandate is that talented people choose to work here, or stay here.
At some point leadership has to ask whether a five-day RTO policy is helping build the future, or helping explain why we’re ranked near the bottom when talent is measured.