The Very Possible Dark Side to Amazon’s Return to Work Mandate
This past Monday, Amazon’s CEO Andy Jassy sent a rather long-winded letter to employees announcing, among other changes, a mandatory “Full-Time Return to Office (RTO)” policy, which will take effect in January, 2025. Basically, he wants to return Amazon back to the days before the pandemic when everyone came into the office five days a week.
Citing a previous announcement from February of 2023 in which he launched Amazon’s hybrid work policy and reviewed the perceived benefits of working together in the office “most of the time,” this latest communication makes a similar argument… “the advantages of being together in the office [full-time] are significant…it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”
Although there are many business leaders who agree with Jassy, the research does not necessarily back up their conclusions. In fact, one recent substantive study by the Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh indicates that RTO mandates “don’t improve employee or company performance.” However, what they do seem to do, the researchers found, is give managers more power and control over their employees.
This means it’s entirely possible that full-time RTO mandates are as much about placating managers who don’t know how to manage their teams remotely as they are about the benefits of in-person teamwork and collaboration.
Additionally, our research at CRL indicates that todays’ Millennial and Gen Z employees feel disrespected and mistrusted when they’re forced to operate in-person all of the time under the heavy gaze of their boss, and as a result are less engaged, loyal and resilient.
On the other hand, during the pandemic, when just about everyone who could work from home did just that, reputable studies indicated that productivity and meeting expectations on time did go down anywhere from 10-20%. Nevertheless, many companies did just fine and even grew (like Amazon) during the pandemic while employee satisfaction stayed the same or even increased.
And let’s remember that a significant percentage of full-time remote workers changed their lives completely as a result of their companies’ enthusiastic commitment to their work-from-home policies during the pandemic. Freed from the requirement to commute to work every day, they moved to less expensive regions and dramatically increased their overall quality of life. Honestly, who would want to go back into the office full-time if life had changed that much for the better because of working remotely?
In fact, when German software giant SAP launched its mandatory 3-days-per-week RTO policy in January of this year, it experienced a massive employee backlash, with over 5,000 signing a letter criticizing the policy, stating they’d felt betrayed and threatening to quit (implying that they might go to work for competitors).
So, full-time RTO mandates are challenging no matter how you look at it or where you stand. But, if we pull up to 30,000 feet and consider Amazon’s latest mandate with a wider and more skeptical lens, we might see some darker reasoning behind this move.
Like many companies – especially in tech – Amazon laid off a slew of workers in early 2023 after very aggressive hiring during the pandemic (some even called it employee “hoarding.”) Now, when times are leaner, with unemployment creeping up and top people less likely to leave, Amazon may be using its full-time RTO mandate to see who wants to stick around and who doesn’t and thereby reduce payroll. By forcing people back into the office, Amazon may be encouraging those who don’t want to comply to quit, allowing the company to avoid wholesale layoffs and expensive, time-consuming terminations and fat severance packages.
This is not as far-fetched as it sounds. One 2023 study, conducted by Bamboo HR, found that 25 percent of managers who instituted a mandatory RTO were hoping it would encourage “voluntary turnover.” And Amazon, which isn’t exactly known for treating employees well and where respect scores particularly poorly on cultural surveys, it’s unlikely that retaining employees who are considered “problematic,” – like those who want to continue working remotely full-time – will be the highest priority.
Nevertheless, giving Amazon the benefit of the doubt, we can all acknowledge that innovation – one of the company’s most important core values – occurs more efficiently and possibly more effectively when employees are in the same space working together in-person day after day. And they do make allowances for personal emergencies, and urgent non-work-related matters – to be negotiated with one’s manager.
But at the same time, forcing them to be face-to-face with each other all of the time – as if there are no viable options – will surely engender resentment and people attempting to get around the rules, or just quitting outright. Perhaps Jassy thinks this is simply the price of doing business. It just doesn’t work for me – does it for you?
