Latest news with #JohnStankey
Business Insider
2 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
AT&T CEO laid out a new vision for the company's culture. Business Insider broke down the aftermath.
Welcome back to our Sunday edition, where we round up some of our top stories and take you inside our newsroom. Since getting laid off nearly two years ago, a former Accenture manager has struggled to land a job. He told Business Insider that recruiters say he's "expensive." On the agenda today: Chipotle's fortunes soared under a fast-food CEO. Employees say they paid the price. A newsletter founder claimed she had over 1 million subscribers. Internal docs are more complicated. America is on the verge of adopting the worst part of Europe's real estate market. Microsoft is mulling a stricter RTO policy. But first: It's a seismic culture shift. If this was forwarded to you, sign up here. Download Business Insider's app here. This week's dispatch We got the memo I was reading around on our site when I saw a scoop pop up. AT&T CEO John Stankey wrote a memo — a long memo — about management and culture and his expectations for employees at the telecom company. (Hats off to reporters Dominick Reuter and Katherine Li.) It was riveting. If you are Musk-esque about working, it would have felt inspiring. If you aren't, it might have felt depressing. Either way, it was nothing if not provocative, and a must-read about the changing workplace — one of the most important topics we cover at Business Insider. After we broke the news, we dug deep for you. We quickly wrote a piece summarizing the main takeaways. Then, we gave guidance on succeeding in a workplace more focused on performance than loyalty and tenure — as Stankey described the culture shift underway. We next talked with Wall Street analysts about how investors were reacting to Stankey's leadership. (The numbers suggest quite well!) And so far, we received over 1,000 reactions from our readers, most of whom thought the CEO's memo wasn't an effective message. (Feel free to share your thoughts in the form at the end of this story.) Finally, our chief correspondent Aki Ito chimed in. Last year, Ito wrote about the end of loyalty in the workplace — the demise of the unwritten contract that solid work would reliably be rewarded. When she saw Stankey's memo explicitly discarding that, she thought: He's saying it out loud. She offered her take in response to Stankey — and she didn't hold back. This kind of varied, engaged, in-depth — and exclusive — coverage of workplace shifts and how to navigate them is why we are here for you at Business Insider. Let us know what you think at eic@ Burrito bowl blues Current and former Chipotle employees told BI the fast-food restaurant used to be a special place to work. It offered a stellar working experience where employees were well-trained and valued. Those qualities, they say, have precipitously declined. In recent years, Chipotle has become a Wall Street darling, with its annual revenue surging to $11.3 billion in 2024. At the same time, it's also become a "Wall of Shame" employer. Inside Chipotle's transformation. A $200 million email empire's shaky subscriber math Daniella Pierson's newsletter empire, The Newsette Media Group, landed her podcasts, speaking gigs, and a spot on Forbes 30 Under 30. She said she had over 1 million subscribers, but her own records tell a different story. A spokesperson for Pierson confirmed the newsletter goes to about 500,000 subscribers each day — less than half the 1.3 million subscribers claimed in a 2025 pitch deck. A BI investigation uncovered questions about what Pierson has told the public and advertisers about her business when compared to what internal documents show. Do her subscription numbers add up? A nightmare scenario Owning a home in Italy may sound like a dream, until the process of finding one turns into a nightmare. Europe's Zillow equivalents only offer partial views of the housing market, and brokers there are known to gatekeep their best listings. In worst-case scenarios, the same house may be listed separately by several agents, each asking for a different price. Thanks to the current Compass-Zillow feud, the US housing market could be heading down a similar path. Adieu, house hunting! Another RTO order looms Microsoft has had a flexible work policy since 2020, allowing employees to work remotely as much as 50% of the time without approval. That may soon change. The software giant is considering a three-day return-to-office order, people with knowledge of the plans told BI's Ashley Stewart. The move would bring Microsoft in line with its Big Tech peers. It could start as soon as January 2026. This week's quote: "It's potentially fatal. You absolutely cannot stay mum in situations like this." — Kevin Donahue, a 30-year veteran of crisis comms, on how Intel should respond to President Donald Trump calling for its CEO to resign. More of this week's top reads: I'm 85 and can't find a job. I receive over $5,000 a month, but it's not enough — I feel like I'm on a sinking ship. Samsung rolls out five‑day RTO tracking tool to curb "coffee badging" for some US semiconductor staff. One popular dating app is actually " crushing it" right now. Bank of America juniors will be reassigned — but not fired — if they accept PE jobs. There's a spending split between Americans, and it's popping up from McDonald's to Uber. I spent three days at KPMG's $450 million training facility to see if it could actually make corporate retreats cool. OpenAI offered me a job. Meta reached out just hours after I posted about it. HBO Max is setting a trap for password sharers. The BI Today team: Jamie Heller, editor in chief, in New York. Lisa Ryan, executive editor, in New York. Akin Oyedele, deputy editor, in New York. Grace Lett, editor, in New York. Amanda Yen, associate editor, in New York.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
AT&T just made it official: Workplace loyalty is dead
It's not every day that a CEO's 2,500-word response to an employee engagement survey goes viral. But that's exactly what happened last weekend, after AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to his managers that my colleagues Dominick Reuter and Katherine Li published for the entire internet to see. Upon first reading it, I laughed at just how blunt Stankey was in his admonishment of his staff who apparently complained in the company's survey. Here goes another executive lashing out at frustrated employees, I thought. But the more times I read it, the more I saw something deeper: perhaps the clearest attempt yet by a major CEO to rewrite the terms of the workplace in contemporary corporate America. Last year, in an essay about the changing relationship between employers and employees, I argued that decades of layoffs, slashed benefits, and hardline management killed off our longheld norms around workplace loyalty. But I had never heard the head of a large corporation actually admit that. Now, here was Stankey — the CEO of a 140-year-old company that once epitomized corporate loyalty — declaring the death of loyalty himself. "Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an 'employment deal' rooted in loyalty," he wrote. "We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements." That "employment deal" Stankey references is known by another name in organizational psychology: the psychological contract. As I wrote last year, it's the set of things that employers and employees believe they owe each other and are owed in return. Usually, these beliefs go unsaid — they're more inferred by the totality of a company's culture. What's unusual about Stankey's note is that he goes on at length making the implicit explicit, telling employees what they're right to expect from the company and what they aren't. Stankey says his workers deserve a transparent career path, a functional office, and the proper tools to do their jobs. But he says they're wrong to expect promotions based on tenure, the flexibility to work from home, and something about "conformance" that I can't decipher for the life of me. Most of all, he says, don't expect loyalty. If there's one thing Stankey gets right in this memo, it's his attempt to spell out these expectations. This shift from what he calls a "familial" culture that takes care of its employees to a "market-based" one has been going on since the 1980s: The days of lifetime job security and pensions are long gone. But CEOs have rarely acknowledged the change, because they've gotten a lot of hard work out of their staff who still believe they'll be taken care of in return. At least Stankey is clear: He won't even pretend to be loyal to his workers. The first step to repairing the broken psychological contract in today's workplace is having an open conversation about what those new expectations exactly are. More and more CEOs are adopting this strategy of management by fear, emboldened by a white-collar recession that leaves disgruntled workers few places to go. The problem, though, is that Stankey's memo isn't so much a conversation as it is a rapid-fire dictation of terms. He offers virtually no room for negotiation, dismissing his dissatisfied employees for "lamenting disruption" and telling them "your professional expectations might be misaligned with the strategic direction of this company." In other words: Get out. It's ironic that he wrote this in response to an engagement survey, which exists for the sole purpose of delivering workers' unvarnished feedback to executives. Stankey clearly has no interest in listening to it. Even more, there's remarkably little that Stankey offers employees in return for the "commitment" he asks from them. The things that he says employees can expect from the company — like a "functional facility" to work in, perhaps a reference to the lack of desks when AT&T brought everyone back into the office earlier this year — are so basic they're laughable. You deserve to have a desk to sit at in this office we forced you back into is hardly a rallying cry. "He's not giving managers any resources to motivate their employees," says Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University who coined the concept of the psychological contract. "He isn't creating a new psychological contract — he's just ending the old one." The only real upside he offers to employees for the commitment he demands is continued employment. In a memo filled with militaristic, drill sergeant language, he cites a quote from an army general that sounds like a veiled threat of unemployment: "If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more." He's trying to scare employees into working hard. More and more CEOs are adopting this strategy of management by fear, emboldened by a white-collar recession that leaves disgruntled workers few places to go. And if a few do leave, great: With AI allowing smaller teams to do more work, companies are trying to cull their headcount anyway. As I've written in a series of stories this year, this hardline approach backfires in all sorts of ways. Even if the vast majority stay, the people who leave are typically the highest performers. Second, if the white-collar job market eventually recovers, AT&T will risk a mass exodus at that point. And most importantly, there's now decades of rigorous research showing how fear is a terrible way to get the best work from your employees. Faster work? Maybe. But it'll be sloppier, less creative, and ultimately less innovative at a time when companies desperately need their teams to stay ahead in the age of AI. Stankey refers to "management science" in his memo, but he'd be smart to study up on what the management science actually shows. (If he did, he would also find that there's virtually no empirical evidence to suggest that a fully in-person workplace performs any better than a hybrid one.) The risk, Rousseau says, is that other companies see Stankey's heavyhanded attempt at rewriting — or ripping up — the psychological contract and feel emboldened to follow suit. CEOs tend to copy each other, and executives from Meta's Mark Zuckerberg to Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi and Shopify's Tobias Lütke have all hinted in recent years that they're done trying to accommodate their employees. What makes Stankey's memo notable is that it could have come from any one of the CEOs atop our largest corporations today. If this is the direction corporate America's headed, that will make work less enjoyable, motivating, and meaningful for the vast majority of us — which will mean our employers will get less inspired work from us. That would have alarmed the Stankeys of the past. But maybe they think they don't need our inspired work — not when AI's doing more and more of the coding, writing, coordinating, monitoring, and analysis that happens inside their businesses anyway. The employees who were once their most prized asset, the thinking goes, feel more like deadweight now. Which is probably why CEOs seem so comfortable now treating them with so little dignity and empathy. Corporate America can't demand commitment without offering its workers an equal commitment in return. It just doesn't work. That's a mistake. In a world where AI makes workforces smaller, the potential impact of each employee expands. And that ends up raising, not lowering, the stakes for attracting and retaining the very best people. It's a paradox the smartest minds in AI already recognize. "I truly believe we can go super super far without growing more," Kian Katanforoosh, the CEO and founder of the software startup Workera, who also teaches Stanford's deep learning class, recently told me. "But we need to have the world's absolute experts in what we do." Meta is doing that by throwing around $250 million pay packages. Most companies can't afford that. Luckily for the non-Metas, there's still a tried-and-true way to inspire great work: Give staff a compelling reason to make the effort. AT&T once did that by taking care of its employees for life. Stankey was right to call it "familial" — it was a literal family for some, like the writer of this 1996 essay in the New York Times I stumbled upon. Not only was this guy a long-time AT&T employee who had risen from the ranks of a software-testing temp, but he was the son of two AT&T employees, whose sisters and brother-in-law also worked for the company. He was a proud AT&T brat. At every turn his father urged him to stick with the company. "To him, the company wasn't a job," he wrote. "It was a way of life." In today's economy, the enticements will probably need to be different from the cradle-to-grave care these businesses once promised. Fixing our fractured world of work starts with figuring out what those enticements will be, so we can forge the psychological contract of this new era. Corporate America can't demand commitment without offering its workers an equal commitment in return. It just doesn't work. Unlike machines, human workers don't perform just because we're told to. As companies go about this work, a good place to start would be the very employee surveys that inspired Stankey's memo. Stankey looked at the drop in engagement and saw a bunch of complainers. What he missed was the hope buried beneath their discontent. Some 99,000 workers cared enough to respond — and many of them voiced their frustrations because they believed AT&T could once again be a place they'd be thrilled to give their best work to. Underlying that hope is one message: It's not too late. Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider
Phone Arena
4 days ago
- Business
- Phone Arena
The real reason AT&T's return-to-office rules are causing tension at work
What is wrong with AT&T is what Redditors ask themselves in a heated discussion – and this time, it's not about connectivity issues, 5G dead zones, or plan price hikes. Instead, the discussion revolves around the way the corporate head treats its employee body. As you may've heard, the AT&T CEO John Stankey recently sent a memo about "being disruptive" and, among other things, he told managers that some employees' views don't match the company's goals. He said workers need to follow the return-to-office policy or consider leaving. Over 99,000 AT&T employees (about 73% of the workforce) responded to a survey earlier. While most said they felt engaged, the company used the results to identify those not aligned with its direction. – AT&T CEO John Stankey in a memo sent to AT&T employees first obtained by Business Insider, August 2023 This memo got emotions boiling and while some industry insiders say that workplace loyalty is finally dead, others took it to Reddit to voice their frustration: Source – Reddit Some have expressed concerns about the way AT&T 's RTO policy is being enforced and the overall work environment. As a matter of fact, AT&T 's five-day return-to-office rollout was off to a rough start in January 2025, with employees reporting overcrowded offices, limited parking, and long elevator wait times – especially at the Atlanta location. Many say they now arrive as early as 6 a.m. just to find a desk, with some ending up in dining areas or conference rooms. Internal documents show AT&T knowingly assigned more employees than desks, assuming not everyone would show up daily. Personalizing desks is banned, and any items left behind are removed. Some employees believe the push away from hybrid work is less about collaboration and more about cutting costs and encouraging Redditor even comes up with a list capturing the main issues: Ignored feedback Forced relocations No advancement Offshoring jobs Broken systems Widespread disengagement The way they put it, some feel that the company's leadership is not listening to employee feedback and is shifting blame onto workers rather than addressing deeper issues. These include a lack of open communication, limited career growth, and morale damage caused by quiet layoffs and forced are also frustrations about perceived outsourcing of jobs overseas, and some employees feel that these changes are weakening internal operations and long-term stability. As a result, disengagement appears to be growing, with some employees reporting that basic collaboration and communication within teams have become increasingly some feel the company's internal systems are showing signs of serious strain. With many experienced staff gone, key processes are reportedly left unsupported, leading to growing inefficiencies across teams. The major service outage last year is seen by some as a warning sign of deeper structural issues. As you probably remember, on February 22, 2024, a major AT&T outage disrupted service for 12 hours, affecting over 125 million devices, blocking more than 92 million voice calls, and obstructing over 25,000 emergency 911 calls.
Yahoo
4 days ago
- Business
- Yahoo
AT&T just made it official: Workplace loyalty is dead
It's not every day that a CEO's 2,500-word response to an employee engagement survey goes viral. But that's exactly what happened last weekend, after AT&T CEO John Stankey sent a memo to his managers that my colleagues Dominick Reuter and Katherine Li published for the entire internet to see. Upon first reading it, I laughed at just how blunt Stankey was in his admonishment of his staff who apparently complained in the company's survey. Here goes another executive lashing out at frustrated employees, I thought. But the more times I read it, the more I saw something deeper: perhaps the clearest attempt yet by a major CEO to rewrite the terms of the workplace in contemporary corporate America. Last year, in an essay about the changing relationship between employers and employees, I argued that decades of layoffs, slashed benefits, and hardline management killed off our longheld norms around workplace loyalty. But I had never heard the head of a large corporation actually admit that. Now, here was Stankey — the CEO of a 140-year-old company that once epitomized corporate loyalty — declaring the death of loyalty himself. "Some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an 'employment deal' rooted in loyalty," he wrote. "We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements." That "employment deal" Stankey references is known by another name in organizational psychology: the psychological contract. As I wrote last year, it's the set of things that employers and employees believe they owe each other and are owed in return. Usually, these beliefs go unsaid — they're more inferred by the totality of a company's culture. What's unusual about Stankey's note is that he goes on at length making the implicit explicit, telling employees what they're right to expect from the company and what they aren't. Stankey says his workers deserve a transparent career path, a functional office, and the proper tools to do their jobs. But he says they're wrong to expect promotions based on tenure, the flexibility to work from home, and something about "conformance" that I can't decipher for the life of me. Most of all, he says, don't expect loyalty. If there's one thing Stankey gets right in this memo, it's his attempt to spell out these expectations. This shift from what he calls a "familial" culture that takes care of its employees to a "market-based" one has been going on since the 1980s: The days of lifetime job security and pensions are long gone. But CEOs have rarely acknowledged the change, because they've gotten a lot of hard work out of their staff who still believe they'll be taken care of in return. At least Stankey is clear: He won't even pretend to be loyal to his workers. The first step to repairing the broken psychological contract in today's workplace is having an open conversation about what those new expectations exactly are. More and more CEOs are adopting this strategy of management by fear, emboldened by a white-collar recession that leaves disgruntled workers few places to go. The problem, though, is that Stankey's memo isn't so much a conversation as it is a rapid-fire dictation of terms. He offers virtually no room for negotiation, dismissing his dissatisfied employees for "lamenting disruption" and telling them "your professional expectations might be misaligned with the strategic direction of this company." In other words: Get out. It's ironic that he wrote this in response to an engagement survey, which exists for the sole purpose of delivering workers' unvarnished feedback to executives. Stankey clearly has no interest in listening to it. Even more, there's remarkably little that Stankey offers employees in return for the "commitment" he asks from them. The things that he says employees can expect from the company — like a "functional facility" to work in, perhaps a reference to the lack of desks when AT&T brought everyone back into the office earlier this year — are so basic they're laughable. You deserve to have a desk to sit at in this office we forced you back into is hardly a rallying cry. "He's not giving managers any resources to motivate their employees," says Denise Rousseau, a professor of organizational behavior and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University who coined the concept of the psychological contract. "He isn't creating a new psychological contract — he's just ending the old one." The only real upside he offers to employees for the commitment he demands is continued employment. In a memo filled with militaristic, drill sergeant language, he cites a quote from an army general that sounds like a veiled threat of unemployment: "If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more." He's trying to scare employees into working hard. More and more CEOs are adopting this strategy of management by fear, emboldened by a white-collar recession that leaves disgruntled workers few places to go. And if a few do leave, great: With AI allowing smaller teams to do more work, companies are trying to cull their headcount anyway. As I've written in a series of stories this year, this hardline approach backfires in all sorts of ways. Even if the vast majority stay, the people who leave are typically the highest performers. Second, if the white-collar job market eventually recovers, AT&T will risk a mass exodus at that point. And most importantly, there's now decades of rigorous research showing how fear is a terrible way to get the best work from your employees. Faster work? Maybe. But it'll be sloppier, less creative, and ultimately less innovative at a time when companies desperately need their teams to stay ahead in the age of AI. Stankey refers to "management science" in his memo, but he'd be smart to study up on what the management science actually shows. (If he did, he would also find that there's virtually no empirical evidence to suggest that a fully in-person workplace performs any better than a hybrid one.) The risk, Rousseau says, is that other companies see Stankey's heavyhanded attempt at rewriting — or ripping up — the psychological contract and feel emboldened to follow suit. CEOs tend to copy each other, and executives from Meta's Mark Zuckerberg to Uber's Dara Khosrowshahi and Shopify's Tobias Lütke have all hinted in recent years that they're done trying to accommodate their employees. What makes Stankey's memo notable is that it could have come from any one of the CEOs atop our largest corporations today. If this is the direction corporate America's headed, that will make work less enjoyable, motivating, and meaningful for the vast majority of us — which will mean our employers will get less inspired work from us. That would have alarmed the Stankeys of the past. But maybe they think they don't need our inspired work — not when AI's doing more and more of the coding, writing, coordinating, monitoring, and analysis that happens inside their businesses anyway. The employees who were once their most prized asset, the thinking goes, feel more like deadweight now. Which is probably why CEOs seem so comfortable now treating them with so little dignity and empathy. Corporate America can't demand commitment without offering its workers an equal commitment in return. It just doesn't work. That's a mistake. In a world where AI makes workforces smaller, the potential impact of each employee expands. And that ends up raising, not lowering, the stakes for attracting and retaining the very best people. It's a paradox the smartest minds in AI already recognize. "I truly believe we can go super super far without growing more," Kian Katanforoosh, the CEO and founder of the software startup Workera, who also teaches Stanford's deep learning class, recently told me. "But we need to have the world's absolute experts in what we do." Meta is doing that by throwing around $250 million pay packages. Most companies can't afford that. Luckily for the non-Metas, there's still a tried-and-true way to inspire great work: Give staff a compelling reason to make the effort. AT&T once did that by taking care of its employees for life. Stankey was right to call it "familial" — it was a literal family for some, like the writer of this 1996 essay in the New York Times I stumbled upon. Not only was this guy a long-time AT&T employee who had risen from the ranks of a software-testing temp, but he was the son of two AT&T employees, whose sisters and brother-in-law also worked for the company. He was a proud AT&T brat. At every turn his father urged him to stick with the company. "To him, the company wasn't a job," he wrote. "It was a way of life." In today's economy, the enticements will probably need to be different from the cradle-to-grave care these businesses once promised. Fixing our fractured world of work starts with figuring out what those enticements will be, so we can forge the psychological contract of this new era. Corporate America can't demand commitment without offering its workers an equal commitment in return. It just doesn't work. Unlike machines, human workers don't perform just because we're told to. As companies go about this work, a good place to start would be the very employee surveys that inspired Stankey's memo. Stankey looked at the drop in engagement and saw a bunch of complainers. What he missed was the hope buried beneath their discontent. Some 99,000 workers cared enough to respond — and many of them voiced their frustrations because they believed AT&T could once again be a place they'd be thrilled to give their best work to. Underlying that hope is one message: It's not too late. Aki Ito is a chief correspondent at Business Insider. Read the original article on Business Insider Solve the daily Crossword
Business Insider
6 days ago
- Business
- Business Insider
AT&T CEO John Stankey's hard-charging leadership style is winning over Wall Street
AT&T is facing a once-in-a-century challenge, and CEO John Stankey is pushing the company to "disrupt itself" and go hardcore to meet the moment. The telecom's sprawling network of copper wires is no longer suited to 21st-century demands for speed and mobility, demands that increasingly require new infrastructure of fiber optic networks and wireless spectrum. Stankey, who took the helm as CEO in July 2020, knows this. He's shown himself willing to do something about it — even if that means a sharp departure from the legacy company's past to prepare for the future. As the company moves to sunset most of its copper network in the US by the end of 2029, Stankey has also instituted a broad cultural shift internally. He's moved away from prioritizing 20th-century corporate values like loyalty and tenure in favor of a tech-style, "more market-based culture," the AT&T CEO wrote in a sweeping memo last week that was first reported by Business Insider. It's a strategy that is showing signs of paying off, with many Wall Street analysts recently boosting their price targets for the stock. AT&T shares are up 22% this year compared to 8.25% for T-Mobile and 6.7% for Verizon. "They refocused on fundamentals, and the fundamentals are just getting better," BNP Paribas telecom analyst Sam McHugh told Business Insider. "Investors really like that simple strategy. It gives a very clear message — it's delivering financially." It's a transition that Stankey says is vital to the company's future — and will take time to accomplish. "We are midstream on a multi-year journey to build the company we want, not simply optimize the one we have," the CEO wrote in his memo. "I tried to pick my brain for an example of another 100+ year old company that didn't have to disrupt itself to secure sustainable relevance. I am still searching for the first example," he added. "I suspect our willingness to disrupt ourselves is the under-pinning of why this company approaches 150 years of relevance." AT&T's bid for continued relevance has meant the building of large and growing wireless and fiber optic networks as it looks to fend off increasing competition from Verizon, T-Mobile, and a host of smaller operators. The company has managed to keep pace with its top competitors in terms of mobile phone accounts as it ramps up an aggressive fiber optic expansion that Stankey says will lead to further mobile signups from customers looking to bundle services. AT&T beat expectations for its second quarter earnings, released in July, on the back of strong wireless and fiber subscriber growth and a multi-year estimated tax benefit of up to $8 billion from the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It could face a more challenging second half of the year. The company said that some of the second quarter's lift came from new customers pulling orders forward to avoid tariff-related price hikes, and that it was cautiously anticipating higher rates of customer churn in the latter half of the year. "We are assuming that we're going to continue to have a competitive environment," AT&T CFO Pascal Desroches told analysts. Another area that Stankey is reshaping is AT&T's workforce. Without such a massive legacy copper network to support, most of AT&T's competitors have managed to grow with a comparatively smaller head count. AT&T now has roughly 141,000 employees, and the company has taken several rounds of reductions in recent years to align its workforce more with its peers. Verizon has 99,000 and T-Mobile has 70,000, and Verizon also gave buyouts last year to some 4,800 workers. The increasingly strict return-to-office mandate that AT&T has rolled out in phases over the past year has also resulted in further reductions, multiple employees have told Business Insider, and Stankey signaled in his memo that he's fine with more people leaving if they're not on board with the company's new direction. "If a self-directed, virtual, or hybrid work schedule is essential for you to manage your career aspirations and life challenges, you will have a difficult time aligning your priorities with those of the company and the culture we aim to establish," he said in the memo. Stankey has taken a similar my-way-or-the-highway approach in the past. He was the company's chief operating officer who drove the acquisition of Warner Media and reportedly led the division with a high-handedness that ruffled the entertainment executives. The move was part of a larger trend of network services providers seeking to own content producers, and Stankey (as CEO) shrugged off setbacks as he pursued a vision of expanding HBO to rival Netflix and Amazon Prime. AT&T jettisoned Warner Media in 2022 at a loss of over $40 billion, and finalized its exit from the media business earlier this year when it sold its remaining stake in DirecTV to private equity firm TPG at a steep discount. While Stankey's apparent appetite for taking big bets seems unchanged, the circumstances around this chapter in the company's history are potentially more favorable. "I'm sure there's a book to be written one day of how you can turn around your profile among investors," said McHugh, the BNP Paribas telecom analyst, who said many long-term investors previously dismissed the company for its poor execution and misallocation of capital into non-core assets, like the media deals Stankey led. "I covered European telcos for a long time. Basically, the stocks that do best in the sector are the ones who have a simple story and just focus on their core competencies," he added. "By luck or by good judgment, I think they're now on the right track." In his memo, Stankey said the workplace and technological shifts were essential for AT&T to succeed in the market, citing US Army General Eric Shinseki as saying, "If you dislike change, you're going to dislike irrelevance even more."
