AT&T CEO John Stankey recently sent shockwaves through corporate America with a memo that signaled a dramatic cultural pivot. The company announced it would move away from a legacy built on loyalty and tenure to adopt a new “market-based” framework that prioritizes what he called “capability, contribution, and commitment.”
Stankey’s memo quickly went viral, but not simply because it was significant for AT&T employees. The memo sets out in plain language a shift that has been ongoing for decades across corporate America: the former “employment deal” that saw employees invest time into a workplace and in work-based relationships in exchange for employment security and robust benefits has now been replaced by a stark metric-based transactional relationship—and employees can either take it or leave it.
What Did the Memo Say?
In early 2025 under Stankey’s leadership, AT&T issued a 5-day return-to-office mandate, which was not met with enthusiasm. Several months later, the company sent an engagement survey to employees, 73% of whom participated. Although 79% of respondents felt "committed and engaged with their work,” Stankey considered this a low engagement figure and responded by issuing a memo.
Peppered with bold statements including “we are not a family, but a team,” the memo made clear that AT&T was definitively moving away from a vision of supporting employees throughout their careers based on their time investment in the organization to a more transactional relationship in which “measurable contributions” were valued. He wrote:
I understand that some of you may have started your tour with this company expecting an “employment deal” rooted in loyalty, tenure, and conformance with the associated compensation, work structure, and benefits. We have consciously shifted away from some of these elements and towards a more market-based culture — focused on rewarding capability, contribution, and commitment.
While expanding upon the idea of a “market-based culture,” Stankey asks his employees to make a decision: “I have to ask you to commit. Commit to adjusting your own behaviors and actions...” And if they don’t commit, they don’t have to stay: “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.” In short, Stankey makes clear that employees must make a choice—they can either get on board or get out the door.
What Does the Memo Reveal?
One thing the memo reveals is an ill-defined sense of workplace “culture.” At various points in his memo, Stankey develops two opposing visions of what AT&T's culture could be. On the one hand is the older model of “loyalty and tenure,” with “an orientation on hierarchy and familial cultural norms.” On the other is his idea of a “competitive market-based culture” that rewards “capability, contribution, and commitment,” that lifts up “performance” as a cultural concept, and that focuses on the “intent to Win as One.”
But how is “loyalty” different from “commitment”? And what does “Winning as One” mean? Stankey does not provide an answer, but he does recognize that “culture” can be hard to define. “This topic is a bit like beauty — it's all in the eyes of the beholder,” he writes, just before asking his workers to “commit” to his vision.
However opaque some of the writing, the memo succeeds in demonstrating that long gone are the days of “AT&T brats,” those who came from whole families employed by the company and who grew their own careers there. Even in the 1990s, it was clear the old model—one in which employees didn‘t see a corporate role merely as a job, but as a “way of life” they were genuinely excited to be a part of—was becoming obsolete. With Stankey’s memo, that change seems to now be complete.
In a sense, Stankey “said the quiet part out loud.” He demonstrated a full-on embrace of the long-running corporate shift from heeding an obligation to support employees as multi-faceted people to viewing them more as revenue-generators to be evaluated by productivity metrics.
What Has the Death of the “Employment Deal” Meant for Workers?
For AT&T specifically, its disregard of the “employment deal” of the past has meant potentially losing workers to its largest competitor. Verizon used AT&T’s return-to-office mandate as an opportunity to market its flexible work environment directly to AT&T employees, hoping to induce them to make the jump.
But what does the memo signal more broadly? It’s no secret that Gen Z workers are well aware of the tenuous nature of employment in the current economy, leading them to demand more of their workplaces and, when those demands are not met, to increased rates of job-hopping. Skeptical of the employer disloyalty that has met them as they entered the workforce, younger workers have responded in kind: giving only as much effort as is needed and prioritizing other aspects of their lives. With Stankey’s memo, perhaps workers in other age brackets will start adopting more of a Gen Z approach to their workplace. What, after all, would hold them back?
Moving Forward
Stankey’s memo may have been meant to shore up AT&T’s culture and ability to compete in the market. But it might very well have the opposite effect: opening a revolving door of workers who stick around only long enough to gain professional experience before moving on to an employer offering more respect and flexibility. Such a situation is not ideal for retaining institutional knowledge or forming a positive workplace culture.
The message is clear for employers: in the face of workforce and marketplace challenges, they must discern who they want to be and do so in concert with several stakeholders—especially employees. Stankey seems to have balked at the feedback he solicited from employees and more or less dictated his new vision, likely introducing misalignment from the start.
Employers should also ask themselves a question that Stankey didn’t seem to contemplate: is it possible to have both a “familial” culture and one that incorporates performance metrics and measurable deliverables? Can both exist together? Further, is there a business case for employers, especially large ones with myriad resources, to support employees as something more than commodities? And might employers even have an ethical obligation to do so? These are the sorts of serious culture questions that employees often crave to see their workplaces wrestling with. They are creative and practical and human. And they make space for more than numbers.