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this post was submitted on 09 May 2026
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That’s not how the conversation goes though.
Right now the conversation is mostly like “we need to cut costs to hit increased shareholder returns so I (the CEO) get my full bonus (which yours is similarly tied to), what are our options to not pay out severance?” Which the CHRO comes back with “RTO policies are great at cutting XX% and we will only have to hire back X% of roles and pay less for those roles and pay less for severance. We can also announce this is due to AI efficiencies and not poor revenue growth and get a bump to the shares we’ve already gotten from past compensation and make the board happy instead of seeing the typical drop in valuation associated with layoffs.”
It’s that simple.
Then there’s a handful of cases like my boss where they are enraged by WFH policies because he is incompetent (has been fired from past middle manager role for being inflexible and ineffective) and highly conservative. His measurement of performance is if your ass is in a chair or not, which doesn’t do much for a team’s performance which is why he has a job. He has been crusading to end remote work policies for all other fully remote departments to limited effect but has succeeded in getting a 1 day per week from his boss’ other teams.
Im sure that all happens, but this part is securities fraud
Also if that RTO reasoning was ever found out in discovery, thats constructive dismissal.
That's why these conversations happen in person on a golf course and not online in slack or email
The C suite are rarely stupid enough to put that sort of thing in writing. It's a conversation, no record.
Although the irony is with wfh that might be a vid conv that could get an AI auto transcript if they forget to turn it off
Oh boy, I cant wait for this to happen in some big case one day.
Even if it’s put in writing, you’d need to sue them and go to discovery and then you’re relying on an IT team to “find xyz” from a request made by legal for discovery.
The odds of anyone ever pulling this off is nearly impossible, especially when the ones laid off all have to sign an indemnity clause against the company for that severance paycheck which says you won’t sue and will defend them in lawsuits in perpetuity. It would have to be one of the c-suite members in the meeting with written evidence, and the second you sue over that you’re blacklisted from ever getting an executive level role again.
Employment law differs outside the US.
Being forced to sign an indemnity clause of that type is illegal and/or unenforceable in most western countries, and discovery of IT records is quite sophisticated.
Having said that, your general thrust of "it is highly unlikely" is certainly true. Someone has to have some basis for starting a suit, fishing expeditions are rarely allowed.
I’m in IT and I’ve worked for multinational companies with billions in revenue. Never seen a thorough discovery but many, many lawsuits and legal holds.
Nobody in IT tries to avoid providing information, but legal and the middlemen have absolutely no idea what data exists, where it exists, what the limitations are… half the time all they ask for are email records and file server records even though there may be texts somewhere, files on user systems or cloud shares that they never think to ask about… they rarely give us much information. We often aren’t even told what they are really looking for - we often just get a few keywords and a timeframe.
Haven’t seen external entities come in and comb through things either, and even if that existed they wouldn’t know where to look unless it’s documented - so things like old tapes, piles of hard drives in an ewaste pile and old backup appliances that are unplugged sitting in a server closet full of drives are totally unknown.
Plus if you know you will be sued there’s usually little reason to have retention longer than a year or two by policy for stuff like email and chat.
Then there’s all the messages sent by leadership in platforms outside of the company that nobody investigates, like WhatsApp or signal.
Maybe it’s different somewhere, but I just haven’t seen it yet.
also "we are spending 50k/month on this building downtown, we could downsize and spend 50k to move all the equipment to a building that meets our needs better for in office staff, but that might make us look weak because we don't have a big impressive building. better bring everyone back to the office instead."
Which is hilarious for the ppl who productivity went up thanks to working from home. Guess back to norma 8 hours