Paycom

Close relationships with immediate teammates

Upper management, particularly the Chief Information Officer, and the outright disrespect they show to their employees. Any employee hired in the past two years was told that they were receiving a hybrid work/life balance of one day per week in-office, with the other four days of the work week being work-from-home days.

Existing employees were also told this, and the only rumors anyone had heard regarding this agreement changing anytime soon involved the possibility that upper management would actually listen to their employees and make the position fully-remote.

Everyone in the QA/Dev departments will agree that there is no reason to have to be in the office ever, considering most of our job is meeting with each other over Zoom, as our teams are split between two states.

However, yesterday the Chief Information Officer at Paycom announced the decision to move every employee back to the office five days a week effective one month from now. This was announced by sneakily attaching a department-wide Zoom meeting invite onto everyone's calendars with five minutes left in the workday on Monday. The invitation was for 10:30 am on the next day, Tuesday.

In the barely-30-minute meeting that ensued, the CIO went on to tell us all that we'd be coming back into the office full-time. This decision, as far as anyone in the department knows, was not run by any QA, Dev, Team Lead, or even supervisors beforehand. We all found out together in a Zoom meeting where chat was disabled.

They "allowed" a Q&A session, but it lasted roughly 10 minutes and the questions were obviously cherry-picked.

The speech was presented in a light-hearted way where we were all compared to the Dallas Cowboys (possibly the worst part of this entire nightmare), and immediately after it, every team in the department had to have emergency meetings with the rest of their team members. From what I've heard, most of these meetings included people talking about their future plans, ways to leave Paycom, how blindsided and hurt they were by this announcement, and just generally trying to make sense of what they had just witnessed. I talked to many people who cried during this whole ordeal.

Some have mortgages on houses they bought recently, some of them have children who won't be able to be put into a daycare system in the next month. Benefits enrollments closed two weeks ago.

The decision to tell the entire department the news in this way feels intentional, almost as if they're trying to get people angry enough to quit. I wish I could offer any counter-evidence to that claim, but upper management still has yet to address any legitimate concerns that this decision will cause to the wellbeing of their employees.

All we have been told is to reach out to our direct leaders, who are now under pressure to "be the face of Paycom" while dealing with their own shock at this announcement, as well as having to hear so many of their best team members openly discuss their plans to leave. It feels like the company is trying to get around layoffs by shadily avoiding any communication with the department until they get angry enough to quit themselves.

Please do not let any recruiters tell you that this will be in any way a "remote" job, and even if you're okay with that, just understand that the people you'll be working under don't respect or care about you in the slightest.

Apologize wholeheartedly. Undo this entire decision. Make QA and Dev fully remote, with the option to come in for those that want to, as an act of good faith to regain all of the trust that you lost. Deeply reflect on the reasons you made this decision and try to learn how to be a more empathetic human. Bring in an ethics consultant that can help provide a detailed action plan you follow to make sure nothing like this ever happens again. Provide your employees with this action plan and keep them in the loop on how it's going. Continue listening to your employees until they feel like they can maybe trust you again, which might be never.