Skydance employees face a five-day office week or a buyout – Human Resources Director

A one-time offer for some staff follows the Warner Bros. Discovery takeover, with job cuts still to come
Skydance is offering some employees a one-time voluntary buyout and moving the entire company to a mandatory five-day in-office policy, according to a memo sent to staff on Monday by chairman and CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz.
“As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here,” Ellison and Kreiz said in the memo, “and we respect that.”
The announcements come weeks after the media company completed its takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, with layoffs still expected.
Paramount closed the roughly $110 billion deal on Oct. 6, and the combined company now operates as Skydance, Reuters reported. Kreiz, a former Mattel CEO, joined the company earlier this month, Variety reported.
The memo doesn’t say how many employees are eligible or what the packages include. Eligibility rules and deadlines vary across the company, according to sources familiar with the situation who spoke to Variety, depending on whether a job is union or non-union and whether a staffer is on contract or at will. Opt-in deadlines generally fall around the second week of November, Variety reported.
Employees who qualify will get an individual communication with their personalized terms and a window to decide, the memo said. Questions go to managers or HR representatives, and legacy Paramount and Warner Bros. staff are pointed to separate internal support channels.
The five-day policy applies across all of Skydance, though many employees already work in the office five days a week, the memo said. The company will phase in the change by location, give employees notice before it takes effect and work with managers on the transition. Ellison and Kreiz acknowledged it may be a significant change to the daily routines of some staff.
“We believe in-person collaboration is vital to our culture and to the success of our business,” Ellison and Kreiz said.
The executives argued that creative work benefits from people being in the same room, and said they’d seen the benefits firsthand at Paramount. Paramount is among the large U.S. employers that have moved corporate staff to five days, joining Amazon, Home Depot and Stellantis, HRD America reported.
Skydance has said it wants more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings within three years, and layoffs will contribute, Variety reported. The company hasn’t said how many jobs it expects to cut. A Los Angeles County report issued in August found the Paramount and Warner Bros. merger could eliminate some 4,500 film and TV jobs over three years in L.A. alone, according to Variety.
The financial backdrop is tight. Skydance shares have fallen about a third this year, and the company is expected to carry about $80 billion in debt, Reuters reported. Reuters said the company is expected to have about 53,000 employees, based on the two companies’ annual filings from the end of last year, and that it will report third-quarter results on Nov. 9.
Leaders flagged workforce changes on the day the deal closed.
“Integrating two companies will bring change, including difficult decisions that affect our workforce,” Ellison and Kreiz wrote in a “Day One” memo to employees on Oct. 6. “We are committed to handling this process thoughtfully and respectfully.”
A voluntary program lets employees decide for themselves whether to leave, so the people who accept won’t necessarily be the ones the company would have picked. Research on office mandates points to retention as the pressure point. Mark Ma, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh’s Katz Graduate School of Business in Pittsburgh, and colleagues ran an analysis of turnover after return-to-office mandates using the LinkedIn profiles of more than three million workers. They found turnover rose 14% after S&P 500 tech and finance companies introduced mandates, with senior, skilled and female employees leaving at higher rates, HRD America reported.
Most of the mandates studied were hybrid arrangements of a couple of days in the office, according to a Quality Digest summary of the study. The researchers also found no significant change in financial performance after mandates took effect, according to HRD America’s reporting. A separate TopResume report found that 25% of U.S. managers had lost team members within six months because of office-return mandates.
Skydance is running its buyout across two legacy workforces with different eligibility rules, deadlines and support channels. Opt-in deadlines generally fall around the second week of November, and the company hasn’t said how many jobs it expects to cut.

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