The announcement from Amazon CEO Andy Jassy came in an understated memo. Starting in January, all employees must come back to the office five days a week.
“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote.
Workers begged to differ.
“It’s time for me to find a new job,” a 25-year-old Bay Area software engineer who works on Amazon’s devices team said to himself after reading the letter.
The engineer, who asked to remain anonymous to speak freely, has worked at Amazon for more than two years in remote and hybrid (three days a week in the office) capacities. Now he’s applying to other companies that offer more flexibility. To him, Jassy’s message confirmed that Amazon doesn’t care about employees’ preferences.
But alienating employees might not be an unintended consequence of Amazon’s policy. It may be the whole point.
Nick Bloom, a Stanford professor known as a guru on the subject of remote work, has theorized that Amazon’s mandate could be a “backdoor layoff” strategy to cut headcount with minimal fuss.
Amazon is just one of the scores of tech companies that hugely ramped up hiring at the beginning of the pandemic for jobs that were fully remote. The influx in workers came alongside more flexible work schedules.
But then came the tech downturn, which hurt stock values and led to widespread layoffs. The theory goes that with a greater focus on efficiency, aggressive return-to-office mandates will ramp up natural attrition and bring down headcounts.
“There’s a power struggle here,” said Cristina Banks, director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Healthy Workplaces at UC Berkeley. “When you put a mandate up against a clear preference, you’re going to get conflict.”
But she’d bet against large swathes of employees “quiet quitting” while they look for more flexible jobs, in part due to the stock compensation structure of many tech workers. “If there’s any leverage that CEOs have, it’s stock options,” she said. “Employees will stay to exercise their options and get the wealth they went to work for.”
Bryan Berthold, a workplace expert at real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, believes companies are using work mandates as an excuse to avoid the complexities of hybrid work. Instead of figuring out how to manage distributed teams and variable schedules, he said, executives are looking for a one-size-fits-all solution.
“CEOs are hugging the horse and buggy, trying not to get hit by the hybrid cars already on the road,” Berthold said.
For their part, companies argue that a return to office is important for collaboration and innovation. But the Amazon employee on the devices team is dubious. “Even when we go into the office, we just do our own work,” he said, acknowledging that teams tasked with research and development might require more in-person collaboration.
Another Bay Area Amazon employee, a 23-year-old engineer in the cloud computing division, said the mandate created a “shared sense of dread” on his team, compounded by genuine confusion about the policy.
“I don’t know what value it brings,” he said. The announcement was particularly baffling given that Amazon’s cloud services have ballooned in profitability during the pandemic.“I’m sure they have something cooking. But I don’t have any clarity on it.”
Amazon operates offices across the Bay Area, in San Francisco, Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, Cupertino, Sunnyvale, and Santa Clara.
A spokeswoman said Amazon shared the announcement well in advance of the January start date to give employees time to transition back to the office, in an effort to strengthen company culture.
Amazon declined to comment about workers planning to leave the company in response to the mandate.
According to a poll on the anonymous job review site Blind, 73% of Amazon workers are considering quitting because of the mandate. The two anonymous employees are skeptical of the number, saying the survey is merely a barometer of frustration. The 23-year-old engineer is on a work visa, as are many of his colleagues, and he doubts there’s a flood of folks headed for the door in the current job market.
At Linkedin, where a three-day return to the office went into effect this week across a number of teams, internal channels were full of whinging, sources inside the company said, but there were no reports of resignations.
Banks said the departures that may result from back-to-office mandates may backfire. Those who will quit, Banks says, are in-demand talent with the most options and parents — usually women — who need flexible schedules for child care.
Time will tell if the mandates are meant to reduce headcount. Banks said if workers leave and are not replaced, it’s evidence that the companies adopted the strategy in the hope that people will quit.
But the Amazon employees said their company operates with ruthless efficiency rather than warm and fuzzy feelings, and management would be more likely to order layoffs than take a roundabout route.
“Amazon has never shied away from a negative public limelight,” the 23-year-old said.