AT&T – “AT&T is a telecommunications company that hates telecommuters - go figure”

Pros

The company is one of the largest US based places to work, and everyone has heard of AT&T. If all else fails, working at AT&T will be a good asset to have when looking elsewhere. Because of the size of the company, the potential exists to be exposed to a number of diverse areas within the company that might not be possible in a smaller company. The benefits that are provided to employees seems to diminish every year, but given the current economic situation, the benefite are still probably better than average. Job security seems to be a bit better as well. It seems when cutbacks are announced, they are almost always voluntary, and the company appears to try to make reductions through attrition.

Cons

The number one downside is this company's upper management tends to run the company like a dictatorship, and employee's opinions are discarded. Morale is about as low as I've ever seen it in my over 15 years at the company. For those of you reading this review that are not employees, would you believe that the world's largest telecommunications company does not allow its employees to work from home? Our leaders could save the company millions of dollars a year (reduced real estate, for example), and employees would save money spent on gas, not to mention we could actually have more time to do our jobs. Not to mention, tons of fewer CO2 emissions. Why does AT&T not want employees to telecommute? I wish I knew.
Another downside is we appear to be on our way to receiving significantly lower or no bonus at all next year. We are given a short e-mail saying we will be measured on three targets. Currently we are below all three. That's it. Soooo, are we at all close to making any of them? Is it hopeless? What should we be doing to make the targets? Is it possible the targets were deliberately set too high so as to be unattainable?

Advice to Senior Management

Randall, John (Stankey) - listen to your critics. You are smart people, but you make bad decisions. #1 issue you need to address is allow responsible employees to work from home. This isn't the 70s where technology wasn't advanced enough to support the way we work today. We sell DSL. Shouldn't ATT be demonstrating to the rest of the world that our products can be used to be productive (and green!)? Some managers undoubtedly will abuse working from home. Get over it. That would be the exception, not the norm, and it should be the employee's manager who is held accountable for their team's actions. I firmly believe allowing a reasonable telecommute policy would be in the company's best interests. And by the way, don't be ridiculous by requiring approvals all the way up to the VP level or higher. I think 1-2 managers is plenty. Anyone higher than that is generally too isolated from the specific situation anyway to have any real input into whether or not somone makes a good candidate.