5 Things AT&T’s Blunt Memo Says About Future of Corporate America

CEOs are done mincing words.

AT&T CEO John Stankey didn’t hold back in a Friday message to managers at the 140,000-person company: “Commit to adjusting your own behaviors.”

Stankey’s message comes about seven months after the company issued a strict return-to-office mandate and amid what the CEO described as a longer-term cultural shift underway.

The 2,500-word memo is a rare and detailed window into a CEO’s thinking during a period of transition. It offers valuable insight for workers beyond just AT&T employees and reveals how a large, legacy company is working to adapt and innovate.

Business Insider published the full 2,500-word memo here.

Here are our top five takeaways on how Stankey’s message reflects broader shifts in corporate culture.

CEOs are done sugarcoating change

The tone of Stankey’s memo is direct, reflecting a broader shift in how corporate executives are communicating to staff.

“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,” Stankey wrote.

This sort of candid communication has become increasingly common among executives as they work to make change, whether return-to-office mandates or efforts to adapt to AI.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told his employees in 2023 that if they didn’t embrace working in the office, they may not have a future at the company.

“It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” he said at the time. “And if you can’t disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it’s not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so.”

Jassy later expanded the mandate to five days a week.

More recently, Jassy didn’t hold back in a memo posted to the company’s website in June. He said workers should expect AI to impact staffing levels.

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​​”In the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company,” he said.

Company culture is no longer about loyalty, tenure, or family. It’s about performance.

AT&T is a nearly 150-year-old company that has long embodied a culture that celebrates loyalty and tenure. Focus on those values, however, is a thing of the past, Stankey said. He was upfront about this change in Friday’s memo.

“This shift can be characterized as moving away from an orientation on hierarchy and familial cultural norms and towards a more externally focused and competitive market-based culture,” Stankey said.

The shift reflects the performance vibe that has become so prominent in Silicon Valley in the last year.

Amy Coleman, Microsoft’s chief people officer, wrote in a message to managers in April that the company was introducing new tools to improve performance management.

“Today, we’re rolling out new and enhanced tools to help you accelerate high performance and swiftly address low performance,” she wrote. “Our goal is to create a globally consistent and transparent experience for employees and managers (subject to local laws and consultation). These tools will also help foster a culture of accountability and growth by enabling you to address performance challenges with clarity and empathy.”

Stankey said performance would be employees’ best metric for longevity at the company moving forward, and encouraged staff to get on board.

“I know change like this is difficult and can be unsettling for some. However, as General Eric Shinseki so eloquently stated, ‘If you dislike change, you’re going to dislike irrelevance even more.'”

Employees need to carry their own weight, and management is watching

In this new era at AT&T, managers will have a new tool for evaluating whether employees are really meeting the demands of their job: data.

“In addition to information garnered from performance reviews, peer feedback, assessments, work history, and certifications (to name a few), we analyze patterns of behaviors from broad cohorts (aggregated data),” Stankey wrote. “This allows leaders to identify behaviors that are obvious outliers, supplemented with the broadest set of information available, to determine if the behavior being evaluated is consistent with our stated priorities and employment expectations.”

Outliers in the data will be identified and dealt with, he said.

“Addressing these exceptions is important to ensure we’re fair to the vast majority of employees who support their colleagues and deliver for the organization every day,” Stankey said.

Amazon took a different approach to the same goal by cutting down on managers to “flatten” the organization and push individuals to pull their weight.

“If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day,” Jassy said.

Some companies see returning to the office as necessary to compete

Stankey said AT&T’s push for change is driven by “efforts that require inter-departmental collaboration and coordination.”

That’s because “collaboration and predictable presence improve each team’s ability to execute effectively on large, complex projects,” he said. To achieve that, employees must “work in person, together, during common hours.”

The idea that working together in an office is ultimately better for the company’s success is a growing belief among executives.

Starbucks CEO Brian Niccol told staff in an email last month that returning to the office allows employees to “share ideas more effectively, creatively solve hard problems, and move much faster.”

“We understand not everyone will agree with this approach,” Niccol wrote. “But as a company built on human connection, and given the scale of the turnaround ahead, we believe this is the right path for Starbucks.”

Returning to the office isn’t always without its problems

Some employees previously told Business Insider that AT&T’s return-to-office push has caused some practical problems, including a lack of desks and parking spaces.

One employee at the company’s Atlanta office said the company’s working environment had “deteriorated” as more employees returned. Two others said finding parking in a timely manner had been a challenge for themselves and for colleagues.

Stankey addressed these complaints in his message in a section titled “Capabilities to do your job.” He wrote, “You deserve tools, processes, and capabilities that help you serve our customers effectively, without being hindered by internal process friction or system constraints.”

Dell faced similar issues following its own return-to-office mandate, which CEO Michel Dell issued in January. When the mandate took effect in March, it caused “lots of in-office politics,” one program manager at the company told Business Insider.