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How Paramount wants its managers to talk about David Ellison’s new RTO mandate

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Paramount Skydance has unveiled “Phase 2” of its return-to-office plan, and it’s telling managers how to sell the changes to staffers.

Employees assigned to US offices outside New York or Los Angeles were told Thursday that they’d be expected to return to in-person work full-time starting on September 14. Staffers at Paramount’s NY and LA offices have already been working five days in the office since January.

Additionally, some full-time remote employees — who don’t live near any Paramount offices — will be expected to return to the office starting in 2027.

Managers who encounter resistance to RTO should help their team bond by inviting them “out for a coffee or lunch, or hold a team-building activity,” Paramount said in an “RTO People Leader Toolkit” obtained by Business Insider.

Bosses who can’t think of a way to unite their team can turn to AI, the document said: “You can also prompt Microsoft Copilot: give me examples of team-building activities.”

“Strong relationships build trust, help people feel part of a community, and enhance well-being,” the document said.

Paramount said it would track RTO compliance and may discipline those who don’t show up when they’re supposed to.

“Managers will be responsible for ensuring team members meet the full-time in-office requirement,” Paramount said in a separate RTO FAQ document. “When expectations aren’t met, it will lead to discipline up to and including dismissal.”

In the toolkit document, Paramount shared specific questions that managers can ask reports to check in or flag noncompliance:

  • “How’s it going coming back into the office every day? Is there anything you need or anything I can do to support you?”
  • “What’s keeping you from coming into the office on those days?”

Paramount’s toolkit document also said that bosses won’t initially have access to attendance data.

“In the beginning, managers will not have access to data to show them who is and is not coming into the office. Managers will eventually have access to this information,” the document said.

A Paramount manager told Business Insider that the responsibility of tracking where employees work “seems daunting.”

“I don’t want to be a hall monitor on top of all the work we already have to do,” they said.

Paramount has said that in-person work is a key to building a “next gen media and entertainment company,” a theme CEO David Ellison has spoken about.

Paramount isn’t the only media company that’s pushed for in-person work, though most of its rivals let staffers work from home sometimes.

NBCUniversal implemented a four-day-per-week RTO mandate in January, and Disney employees are also expected to work at the office four days a week. Employees at Warner Bros. Discovery — which Paramount is buying — commute to the office three days a week, while Netflix lets staffers work remotely.




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More hiring managers want you to prove you’re good with AI during job interviews

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Leaders at the software company Canva used to wonder whether job candidates were secretly using AI during technical interviews.

By early last year, that concern gave way to a bigger question: How good are they with AI?

Managers saw the company’s engineers getting more done with the technology, so they needed to ensure new hires could do the same.

“We just flipped the script and went, ‘OK, we’re going to invite you to use AI,'” Brendan Humphreys, Canva’s chief technology officer, told Business Insider.

The result, he said, has been stronger hires better equipped to wield powerful AI tools to help write code and solve problems.

Canva is one of a growing number of companies — including Meta and McKinsey — that are inviting some job candidates to use AI in parts of the hiring process.

Broadly, when ChatGPT emerged in late 2022, many employers worried that job seekers would use AI to help talk their way past interviewers. Yet as the technology becomes more capable and embedded in daily work, a number of companies are moving from policing it to evaluating candidates’ AI know-how.

That’s what happened at Arcade, an IT infrastructure startup. The company has always asked technical candidates to complete a take-home exercise. Yet now, it expects them to use AI in the process, Alex Salazar, the company’s cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider.

As the technology’s capabilities surged over the past year or so, he realized that candidates would likely turn to AI regardless of whether Arcade sanctioned it. Ultimately, Salazar said, the company wants its workers, including new hires, to use AI.

“So why are we creating this artificial test that doesn’t even really reflect the work they’re going to do when they get here?” he said.

Humphreys came to a similar conclusion at Canva. To factor in AI, he said, the company reworked its technical interview to make the questions “complex, ambiguous, and problematic.”

“If you just dump the question that we’re giving you into an AI, you’re going to get a substandard answer,” Humphreys said.

To land a job at the company, which has about 265 million monthly users of its graphic design software, technical candidates need to know how to thoughtfully question AI, he said.

Show us you can work with AI

One way to avoid concerns that candidates might be leaning too hard on AI is to have job seekers show their work. In Canva’s case, the company asks candidates to share their screen during a technical interview.

“We want to see the interactions with the AI as much as the output of the tool,” Humphreys said.


Brendan Humphreys

Brendan Humphreys, CTO at Canva

Courtesy of Canva



Arcade tells candidates to use whatever AI tools they want on their exercise, then include a transcript of their conversations with the AI. The idea is to learn who knows how to do the job and to work with an agent. Doing so, Salazar said, comes with a “very real learning curve.”

He said that the shift to allowing AI use in the exercise meant that Arcade placed greater emphasis on a candidate’s “taste.” That sensibility is important, he said, because AI can kick out answers, yet the best results often come from repeated iteration with these tools, he said.

“It’s going to show their ability to use the AI, but it’s also going to show what they think ‘good’ is,” Salazar said of candidates’ interactions with AI.

‘Ride the dragon’

Other companies want workers to demonstrate their AI acumen during the hiring process, too.

In a June post on an internal message board, Meta said it was developing a coding interview in which candidates could use an AI assistant, Business Insider previously reported.

That mode of working, Meta wrote, was “more representative” of the environment in which future developers would be operating. It also makes “LLM-based cheating less effective,” the company said, referring to large language models.

The consulting firm McKinsey & Company is piloting a change to its graduate recruiting process, asking candidates to use the company’s internal AI assistant, Lilli, during case interviews to assess how they work with the technology, several media outlets reported in January.

The acceptance of, or even the preference for, AI in some parts of hiring doesn’t mean companies will welcome job seekers who use the tools to misrepresent their skills. Even if a candidate gets away with it at first, hiring managers are likely to eventually discover that someone doesn’t have the goods, Susan Peppercorn, an executive coach, told Business Insider.

That’s because candidates who complete an assessment, for example, “are going to have to explain how they arrived at their thinking,” she said.

Understanding that thought process is what Canva seeks in its hiring, said Humphreys, who oversees roughly 2,600 technical employees in roles including software engineering, IT, and machine learning.

It’s a way of seeing whether a candidate makes sound technical decisions when it starts producing code, he said.

“What we’re testing for now in our interview process is an ability to harness that power, to control that power — to kind of ride the dragon,” Humphreys said.

Do you have a story to share about your career? Contact this reporter at tparadis@businessinsider.com




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Amazon gives managers a new way to spot who’s barely coming into the office

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Amazon is equipping its managers with powerful new metrics to monitor their reports with a dashboard that tracks not only whether employees show up to the office, but also how many hours they spend there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider.

The move marks an escalation in the surveillance of white-collar workers at the e-commerce and cloud computing giant. Last year, Amazon implemented one of the industry’s most stringent RTO mandates, requiring most employees to work from an office for five days a week. Now, managers have a way to spot — and potentially confront — employees who fall short of these expectations.

The updated dashboard, which began rolling out in December, allows managers and HR to view how often employees come into an office, how long they stay, and the locations where they work. It refreshes at 5 p.m. PT daily and tracks these metrics over a rolling eight-week period.

The system flags three kinds of employees: “Low-Time Badgers,” defined as employees whose weekly median time in the office is less than four hours per day, averaged over a rolling eight-week period; “Zero Badgers,” who don’t badge into any Amazon building during that span; and “Unassigned Building Badgers,” who badge into a building other than the one they’re assigned to over half the time.

“These metrics are intended to surface employees operating significantly outside documented in-office expectations,” the document says.

“For more than a year now, we’ve provided tools like this for managers to help identify who on their team may need support in working from the office each day,” an Amazon spokesperson told Business Insider. “We recently updated the dashboard to make it more consistent for all managers, but most of the data and functionality was previously available. We continue to see the benefits of having our teams working together, and we haven’t changed our expectations for employees to be in the office.”

Amazon notes in the document that managers are expected to “apply judgment” when determining whether to initiate formal disciplinary follow-ups.

In 2023, Amazon began tracking and sharing individual office attendance records, reversing a previous policy that only tracked anonymized, aggregated attendance data.

A year later, the company began cracking down on “coffee badging” by informing some teams that they needed to be in the office for a minimum of two to six hours to have their attendance count. The crackdown received criticism from some employees, including one who compared the move to being treated “like high school students,” Business Insider previously reported.

The updated dashboard standardizes these metrics across Amazon’s entire corporate workforce, excluding workers such as warehouse staff and contractors. It grants managers direct, on-demand access to data that they would have previously had to request from HR, according to an Amazon employee familiar with the company’s policies.

Amazon is positioning the dashboard as a means to encourage in-person collaboration.

“Working In-office is important to our culture and is also about more than just being physically present during the week,” the document said. “Managers are expected to promote meaningful team collaboration through direct interactions with their team rather than just remotely monitoring badge swipes each week.”

Amazon is hardly alone in using badge data to police return-to-office rules.

Samsung rolled out a manager-facing tool that shows “days and time in building” metrics, aimed at discouraging “lunch/coffee badging.” Dell informed hybrid staff that it will track on-site presence via badge swipes and could factor attendance into performance and compensation.

Bank of America issued warning notices to employees, informing some that continued noncompliance with its RTO policy could result in further disciplinary action. At JPMorgan, employees have described an internal dashboard that calculates the share of eligible days spent in the office and is visible to senior managers.

In the UK, PwC has said it would track employees’ work locations to enforce its RTO policy.

Have a tip? Contact Pranav Dixit via email at pranavdixit@protonmail.com or Signal at 1-408-905-9124. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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Amtrak’s unionized workers are getting $900 holiday bonuses after their managers gave up half of theirs

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Amtrak is redistributing the wealth this holiday season at the urging of the Trump administration.

Amtrak is giving $900 holiday bonuses to its over 18,000 unionized workers, the Department of Transportation said this week.

The bonuses are the result of a deal between the DOT and Amtrak management and its board of directors, the agency said, adding that Amtrak’s executive leadership agreed to give up half of their own bonus package to make it happen.

“Christmas is coming a little early this year for 18,000 @Amtrak frontline workers, thanks to leadership who gave back their holiday bonuses,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in an Instagram post on Friday. 

President Donald Trump’s administration has been critical of the existing bonus structures for Amtrak leadership, with the DOT saying they resulted in “exorbitant payouts for senior staff.” As part of the agreement, Amtrak’s board has agreed to get rid of long-term incentive bonuses for its senior executives, DOT said.

“We applaud Amtrak and its executive leadership team for doing the right thing,” Steven G. Bradbury, the deputy secretary of Transportation and a representative for Duffy to Amtrak’s board, said in a statement.

Amtrak did not respond to a request for comment.

The Wall Street Journal reported that around 246 Amtrak managers gave up part of their bonuses that totaled $16.2 million. The DOT did not provide additional comment or confirm those figures when reached by Business Insider.

In its announcement, the DOT touted Amtrak’s record-breaking year. The national passenger rail service had a record 34.5 million customer trips in the fiscal year that ended in September, posting a record adjusted ticket revenue of $2.7 billion.

The bonuses were reminiscent of some received by other transportation workers this holiday season. The Federal Aviation Administration said it was giving $10,000 bonuses to the nearly 800 air traffic controllers who had perfect attendance during the government shutdown.

Have a tip? Contact this reporter via email at kvlamis@businessinsider.com or Signal at @kelseyv.21. Use a personal email address, a nonwork WiFi network, and a nonwork device; here’s our guide to sharing information securely.




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