Examining the Big Bet on Amazon's Back-to-Office EdictExamining the Big Bet on Amazon's Back-to-Office Edict

Shortly after last week's WorkSpace Connect article went out, Amazon made the news by informing its employees that its five-year era of remote and/or hybrid work was over as of January 2, 2025. Employees were to be required to come back to the office. Response has been swift and illuminating, including, but not limited to:

The disconnect between management and the workforce they're supposed to manage is undeniable. And while it may seem that management is using economic anxiety and uncertainty to press an advantage -- come back to the office or face losing your job -- it's a risky bet to take.

First, if this move is indeed a stealth reduction in force, it's a move that reduces headcount in a completely chaotic way. Management would have no way to make strategic job eliminations and no way to proactively reorganize their workforce; they'd be playing catch-up and doing a lot of reactive adjustment. It's a lot more work than old-school, intentional layoffs would be, and it's a mostly unnecessary waste of remaining employees' time as they scramble to revamp teams and processes on the fly.

Second, this kind of move obliterates any sense of employee well-being -- an intangible that's linked to productivity and money-saving employee retention -- and encourages your best and brightest to find the employer that will let them continue with a remote or hybrid workplace. It's a great time for recruiters to go surfing through LinkedIn for the Amazon talent of their dreams.

(It's also a good time for companies to reassure their employees that they'll retain hybrid work policies, as Microsoft's Satya Nadella has reportedly done. This reassurance can assuage workers' concerns about whether it's time for them to engineer an exit ahead of them losing the work-life balance they so prize.)

Finally, this sort of disconnect runs counter to four years of data on how workers feel about having more control over when and where they work. The results are unambiguous. And yanking away the control people have had is not going to be perceived as anything other than a workplace removing something that made keeping the job worth it. Loss aversion -- the sense that a change will lead to greater loss, not greater benefits -- will propel people out the door, if you're lucky. If you're not, they'll just slouch into the office and engage in the kind of fauxductivity that takes away from the bottom line.

While the reporting and editorializing on Amazon's new edict was quick to arrive, it is going to take us longer to see how Amazon as a workplace will be affected by this managerial decision. So far, all evidence suggests the effects won't be to the greater good of workers or the workplace. But who knows? We will all have an exciting new opportunity to see how a company that relies on highly in-demand talent will manage a workforce that doesn't want to be there.