AT&T CEO Stankey says the carrier needs to embrace change and disruption
AT&T CEO Stankey sends memo to employees about being disruptive.
AT&T CEO John Stankey wrote a long memo to "All AT&T Managers" on Friday in which he tried to get workers to understand that some of their thinking was "misaligned with the strategic direction of this company." Business Insider was able to obtain a copy of the note, which included Stankey's thoughts on the results of AT&T's employee engagement survey. The CEO, discussing the telecommunication firm's demand that workers return to the office for all five days of the workweek, told his employees that they must follow what the company tells them to do or else get a new job.
AT&T wants to bring employees back to the office five days a week
The note was written to show workers just where their "professional expectations" may be "misaligned with the strategic direction of this company," Stankey wrote, "If you are of the small minority that shared comments similar to, 'I have heard this nonsense before and I'll ignore things until this goes away…' or 'things were just fine the way they were…' there might be a disconnect between you and your current professional choice."
The survey was responded to by more than 99,000 AT&T employees, which works out to 73% of the telecom giant's workforce. Stankey's memo made it known that 79% of the respondents felt committed and engaged with their work. The point of the survey seems to be to find employees who haven't bought into AT&T's business philosophy and warn them that they might be better off leaving.
"We run a dynamic, customer-facing business, tackling large-scale, challenging initiatives," Stankey wrote. "If the requirements dictated by this dynamic do not align to your personal desires, you have every right to find a career opportunity that is suitable to your aspirations and needs." What brought all of this up were changes made to the AT&T work schedule. The company replaced a hybrid work calendar that allowed employees to work from home some days of the week with a stricter mandate that requires them to work in the office each and every day of the five-day workweek.
Mentioning the RTO (return to office) orders in the memo, AT&T's Stankey wrote about his employees' "right to expect to work in a professional, well-maintained, and functional facility." Some AT&T workers told Business Insiders that with the RTO chaos, it became difficult for those returning to the office to obtain office desks and parking spaces. Verizon used AT&T's RTO mandate as a way to entice AT&T employees who'd rather work from home to take a job at Verizon.
"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.'"
-John Stankey, CEO, AT&T
AT&T's CEO says that the RTO transition is a shift away from "loyalty, tenure, and conformance with the associated compensation," to "a more market-based culture —focused on rewarding capability, contribution, and commitment." Stankey presented change in general as something that a company needs to experience to stop it from becoming irrelevant.
When it comes to network performance, AT&T has been called both the worst and the best of the big three U.S. carriers during 2025. Ookla's Speedtest Connectivity report had AT&T third after T-Mobile and Verizon for the first half of 2025. On the other hand, RootMetrics had AT&T tops in the U.S. during the first six months of 2025, ahead of Verizon and T-Mobile. Investors think that something positive is going on behind the scenes at AT&T. The stock is up 21.6% for 2025 year-to-date topping T-Mobile (up 16.7%), and Verizon (up 6.6%).
Stankey said that while there are many who don't like the idea of causing disruptions at companies, he said that he couldn't find another firm more than 100 years old (like AT&T) that didn't need to disrupt itself to remain relevant. So let the disruptions begin at AT&T.
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