Senior

• Current Employee

• Houston, TX
• 26 Jul, 2019

Loving it; hoping leadership moves towards a more distributed workforce

Pros

I have been working at AT&T full-time for less than a year - Get Fortune 10 company experience Given the company's size, you can pursue almost anything that interests you during your career. Work with REALLY big data sources. Work with some preeminent big data technologies. Everybody that I've met in senior leadership is an AT&T veteran and seems to really understand the business. While outside senior leaders bring fresh perspective, it can also be frustrating when they don't understand the business they're supposed to be running. The company is very diverse and celebrates diversity. At least in my department, there is some flexibility on when you show up and when you leave the office. The company treats their employees better (e.g. benefits) a LOT better than other Fortune 500 companies for whom I've worked. For example, 6 weeks of paternity leave, adoption assistance, fertility treatment assistance, etc.

Cons

As a Fortune 10 company, AT&T doesn't move as 'fast' as a start up does. Little flexibility to work from home or work remote. Pushing everybody into open floor, hot desk office plans.

Advice to Management

I perceive that AT&T leadership has aggressively pushed HR policies to 1) make people work on 'shared desk' floors and 2) move to Dallas and work at the office every day. I would like to see more communication about the ‘why’ behind these policies. In a vacuum of information, I’m only seeing my (negative) perspective. I do NOT work best in a 'shared desk' environment and don't like that AT&T, which celebrates diversity, has shoved tens of thousands of square peg workers (who would work better in a dedicated office space with more privacy) into a round hole. The same thing applies with forcing everybody to move to Dallas and minimizing work from home/remote flexibility - many wonderful people have left the company because AT&T wouldn't afford them the flexibility to stay in town until a parent died, a child finished high school, etc. Is the incremental 'creativity and collaboration' of having everybody in the same Dallas office a few days out of the week worth 1) losing thousands of employees and 2) workers like me trying to overcome the reduction in productivity from my counter-productive work environment? Also, it seems ironic to me that we pride ourselves on selling solutions to help businesses collaborate with distributed work forces, yet don't practice it. Again, I would at least like to hear more from leadership on the 'benefits' of such a large staffing decision. In a vacuum of that information, I'm just seeing the down-sides and assuming this is a cost-cutting play. I haven't seen any quantitative analyses demonstrating the benefits of these office plans; all I've heard are anecdotes about how great these office plans are.