Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is not making any friends among Amazon workers with his latest demand: Employees must work from the office five days a week.

Like many companies, Amazon switched to remote work during the pandemic before settling into hybrid work in the aftermath. Unlike many companies, however, Amazon has been hell-bent on returning to the old ways, steadily forcing employees to return to the office more and more.

Listen to a podcast conversation on Amazon’s back-to-work mandate. Could it backfire?

In his latest memo to employees, Jassy says the company will now require corporate employees to be in the office the full workweek. Jassy framed the decision in the context of maintaining the company’s ‘unique culture.’

Our culture is unique, and has been one of the most critical parts of our success in our first 29 years. But, keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time. When you consider the breadth of our businesses, their associated growth rates, the innovation required across each of them, and the number of people we’ve hired the last 6-8 years to pursue these endeavors, it’s pretty unusual—and will stretch even the strongest of cultures. Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for the s-team and me. And, I think about it all the time.

Two areas that the s-team and I have been thinking about the last several months are: 1/ do we have the right org structure to drive the level of ownership and speed we desire? 2/ are we set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other (and our culture) to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business that we can? We think we can be better on both.

After discussing the company’s organizational structure, Jassy dropped the hammer on remote work.

To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. I’ve previously explained these benefits (February 2023 post), but in summary, we’ve observed that 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. If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.

Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well. But, before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward—our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances (like the ones mentioned above) or if you already have a Remote Work Exception approved through your s-team leader.

Jassy Personifies a Bygone Era

The decision is sure to stir up a firestorm within the company. Jassy previously drew fire from employees earlier in the company’s RTO plans, saying there was no data to support the decision.

“There was no data when we were deciding to pursue AWS, which was quite different from the rest of our businesses at that time, that we were going to be successful. In fact, most people thought it was nuts internally and externally,” Jassy said at the time.

Not only did Amazon executives not have data to support RTO mandates, but the data actually shows that employees are more productive and work longer hours than employees working in the office. To make matters worse, RTO mandates have led to mass resignations, with some companies struggling to fill some of their most important roles as a result.

In fact, the data suggests that the main reason some companies are pursuing RTO mandates is strictly because of workaholic CEOs, likely older males, who are out of touch with the modern workforce and misinterpret employees’ desire to work remotely.

“Because the labor market is looser and there’s more talent to be hired, I think the employers think they’ll be able to get their way,” said Dr. Grace Lordan, associate professor in behavioral science at the London School of Economics.

“This belief of a certain cohort of people, and they are represented across all sectors, that presentee-ism is productivity, for them it’s perfectly rational that if somebody doesn’t want to come into the office then that basically means they’re not somebody who wants to add value to the firm,” Lordan added.

Enlightened CEOs Embrace the New Normal

In contrast to CEOs like Jassy, some corporate heads recognize the value remote and hybrid work bring, both in productivity and employee happiness.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houson emphasized in late 2023 that his company would not embrace RTO mandates, and companies that did embrace them would do so at their own peril.

“I’d say, ‘your employees have options,’” Houston said when asked what message he had for his peers. “They’re not resources to control.”

“From a product design perspective, customers are our employees. We’ve stitched together this working model based on primary research,” he continued. “We’ve just been handed the keys that unlock this whole future of work, which is actually here.”

“You need a different social contract, and to let go of control,” Houston added. “But if you trust people and treat them like adults, they’ll behave like adults. Trust over surveillance.”

Similarly, Atlassian CEO Scott Farquhar highlighted the fact that he worked remotely most of the time.

“I work from home all the time,” Farquhar said in 2023. “I might come into the office about once a quarter.”

“I still work really hard and I work with the teams who are around the world and Australia,” Farquhar added.

Farquhar said his company had not seen a productivity drop and, much like Houston, emphasized the need to trust employees to do their job, rather than try to regulate their location.

“Their work is a vocation not a location and so we expect people to be able to work from home, from a cafe, from an office, but we don’t really care where they do their work – what we care about is the output that they produce,” he said.

Unfortunately, some old-school CEOs like Jassy have not yet got the memo, trying to force people to return to yesteryear’s normal.