Thread regarding Open Text Corp. layoffs

180 from this https://www.opentext.com/assets/documents/en-US/pdf/opentext-ceo-wp-resilient-organization-covid-19-new-ways-to-work.pdf

Mark was just pi---d no one was there to inflate his ego and kiss his shoes.

So now he’s on a revenge mission to fire everyone

Shortly after the acquisition of Micro Focus the RTO found that there were way to few cubicles at the Santa Clara California office, so they just closed it and told all Bay Area employees they were all virtual now.

To this day OT still pays the lease. They may have subleased it by now..

How is that balanced and fair, DIVERSE EQUITABLE & INCLUSIVE to the thousands of other employees who must waste hours driving to the office, especially when NONE of their team is at the same site???

Last year Mark was PI---D when he showed up to the HQ in Waterloo Canada and he saw lots of empty cubicles on a required day in the office.

Maybe its a ego thing for him..

Big Brother (Mark) wants to keep an eye on you. He probably has 500 monitors all hooked up to camera feeds in all the offices and he's watching you like some deranged lunatic.

Forcing employees back to the office under the guise of “culture” or “collaboration” is often a thinly veiled tactic. In many cases, it serves one of two purposes: either to push voluntary attrition as a cost-cutting measure without triggering severance obligations, or it reflects outdated leadership mindsets rooted in 1990s-era management thinking—where trust is low, supervision is high, and productivity is equated with physical presence.

At OpenText, it may be a combination of both. There’s a clear need to reduce costs, and encouraging resignations without backfilling helps. At the same time, some leaders seem stuck in the Oracle playbook from 30 years ago, believing employees need constant oversight to deliver.

I’m looking at you Mark. You aren’t Larry and this isn’t the 1990’s. Modernize or move out of the way and let someone else run the company.

If RTO is so beneficial, why so much CEO jet setting all over the globe? If it all can be done better at the office, have sales stay home. It's just an excuse to replace high wage technical employees with substandard cheap labor. None of the “centers of excellence” staff is the same caliber or works as long as the person who was laid off. Gird your loins as quality is crashing.

Organizations across the tech sector evolve their workplace strategies, the decision to mandate full-time office attendance raises several critical challenges:

1. Talent Attraction and Retention: The global workforce increasingly values flexibility. Strict RTO policies may limit our ability to attract top talent and risk attrition of high-performing employees who prefer or require remote work arrangements.

2. Employee Engagement and Morale: For many, the forced return to office is viewed as a step backward. This can negatively impact morale, reduce engagement, and foster a perception of mistrust or inflexibility from leadership.

3. Productivity Assumptions: Data across the industry shows that productivity has remained stable or improved for many remote workers. Requiring office presence without clear productivity gains may be seen as arbitrary or disconnected from outcomes.

4. Equity and Accessibility: In-person mandates may disproportionately affect caregivers, employees with disabilities, and those in remote or high-cost living areas, undermining diversity, equity, and inclusion commitments.

5. Competitive Disadvantage: As peer companies embrace hybrid models, offering flexibility becomes a differentiator in the talent market. Mandates risk making us less competitive and could drive skilled professionals to more accommodating employers.

6. Operational Costs vs. ROI: A full return to physical offices reintroduces higher real estate and facilities costs. Without demonstrable ROI in collaboration, innovation, or customer outcomes, this becomes difficult to justify.

How many people did they need to hire in HR to run, analyze and distribute the reports to management to keep up with the monitoring? This is no small task.
What about management's time pouring over the reports, identifying the criminals, documenting their transgressions, meeting with them and haranguing them?
When will they install the keystroke software and mouse monitors?
Maybe take away everyone's laptops and go back to desktops so they can't work at home. This means they get rid of VPN and move from the cloud back to on prem (oh the irony).
How long will it take of some ingenious soul to create an OpenText office background for teams and hack into the badging system? On company time of course.
The cost of this childish, humiliating micro management definitely outweighs the theoretical productivity increase or savings from quitting vs. WFR.

It's to trim some fat before massive layoffs by making them A) quit or B) get terminated for breaking contract. Then queue the massive layoffs because Mark needs to buy a new yacht.

And he preaches so much cr-p about values, loyalty and other BS in e-mails all day long, it's getting super annoying. More than half of the company is living under constant fear of the hammer, way to keep the minions in line. And you cry about productivity. Why be productive when I'm out the door the next day with 0 notice?

I wish I could report Mark's e-mails as spam. Guy just sits around all day spamming our inbox with the d-mbest sh-t ever.

Asking Opentext not to micromanage is like asking a scorpion not to sting—it's in its very nature. Opentext , by design and definition, a palace where micromanagement is not only practiced but celebrated. It thrives and flourishes at every level. The organization is built as a pyramid of micromanagement, cascading from top to bottom: team leads micromanage their members, only to be micromanaged by their managers, who are in turn overseen by senior managers, who answer to directors. At the apex sits Mark, who micromanages and monitors them all.

This is a fear-driven culture, where leadership believes it is better to be feared than respected. Those who had options have already left. Those who remain are here not by choice, but by lack of alternatives.

He’s just mimicking Musk. I wouldn’t be surprised if he brought a chainsaw to the next all hands.

The talking points are:

1. Better Together: more engagement, brainstorming, knowledge sharing , water cooler convos.
2. Office assigned employees have had 2 years to make this work for them - move closer , get a vehicle, adjust. But since folks are generally going in one day only, needs to be enforced.
3. 5 days encouraged. Leadership is to encourage 5 days and talk up the value. Likely means after the data collection from now to June 30 which will be spun into meaningful productivity, FY26 will bring about full RTO, pre Covid rules.
4. As noted, all virtual hiring has ceased with the exception of within sales orgs. This means in non sales orgs, employees who are virtual will be anomolys to company culture and will be phased out. When a WFR exercise identifies 3 headcount in a non sales function, the selected employees will be considered from the virtual pool first.
5. People managers will monitor badge swipes for directs. Leaders for their full teams, including their people managers. Yes, mangers who are not labeled virtual MUST do their corp days. Executives will monitor their full org. Huge directive to leadership from the ELT that this is to be enforced, including by requiring any TEAMs calls with office people on corp days with virtual managers or leaders include video to be sure based on background they are in office and not coffee badging.
6. It is aligned with tech corporations and OT customers who are back to RTO either hybrid or full time.
7. This was supposed to be happening for two years - 3 days in. Something must have surfaced to require the now enforcement.

My whole team and I are virtual so unaffected for now, how has it gone down for you office staff then, like a lead balloon?

Being virtual I agree with other comments I think we will be the first out the door when the time comes.

Being psychopaths, they just say anything. It’s just business. Not sure of real motivations but maybe a combination of stealth layoffs plus realestate issues ?, plus simple marketing signalling since RTO is a market trend now. Remember that psychopaths have goals and just work to achieve their goals; when you get those silly diversity emails from MarkB just scan for any layoff news and then file to Trash.

the problem for most CEOs in several companies nowadays is they don’t think the same way we think.
They think it’s just a business, not about morality. No compassion. Money first, people last. Blame employees with failure. Control brings principles. Power brings royalty. Mark is not an exception. Look at other CEOs, they all act similar. Starbucks, IBM, Intel, Dell, etc…