IBM to Managers: Move Near an Office or Leave Company

They asked nicely. Then they abruptly started threatening termination. Keep in mind this is after they had to close a few offices when the regular employee RTO mandate resulted in a large amount of attrition.

So now there are people with 120+ mile round trip commutes because they live within the cutoff distance. Nearly all meetings are video calls anyway due to team members being scattered all over the world. When folks asked leadership why in a company-wide meeting months ago they basically said to suck it up.

This has morale pretty low, when it was already terrible even for folks that prefer in-person and live close. Some quit after the announcement. The brain drain is already causing an impact because there’s so much tribal knowledge and teams are silo’d as hell.

Never seen a company so out of touch or be so openly hostile to their workers. It’s just wild.