Amazon’s return-to-office policy announced last month, requiring employees to work in-person five days a week starting in 2025, is already frustrating employees. Some have begun “ferociously applying” for new positions in hopes of securing a spot at a tech company. The problem for them is that that may be exactly the response Amazon was expecting.
Tech giants’ push for stricter RTOs may just be a sneaky way to fire workers, some experts on the future of work say. Amazon probably already knows that the new policy will get rid of disgruntled employees without having to go through the grueling process of formal termination. As a trade-off, the RTO movement may come at the expense of the company’s own human resources and technological advances.
“Amazon may have taken the view that it would be better to cut costs by reducing the number of employees and take the hit from technology and innovation,” Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, told Business Insider. spoke.
The company may be content to sacrifice brain drain. The RTO crackdown comes as CEO Andy Jassy calls for management reductions and a 15% increase in employee-to-management ratios by the end of the first quarter of 2025. I was disappointed. Amazon said the RTO shift is an effort to strengthen its corporate culture and there are no plans to cut staff.
Brian Elliott, future of work advisor and author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives, agreed with Bloom. He told Fortune Amazon that the company would “definitely” see attrition in its workforce as a result of the mandate, as it remains widely unpopular among most U.S. workers.
“Most people want something in between. They want to spend quality time with their team a few days a week,” he says. “By the way, people who are deprived of flexibility are much more likely to jump.”
Research conducted by human resources consultancy Robert Half last month found 39 per cent of Australian office workers would quit if their companies cut back on flexible working options. Amazon employees already corroborate that statistic. Blind, an anonymous job review site, surveyed 2,585 verified Amazon employees the day after Jassy’s RTO announcement and found that 73% of employees would quit their jobs because of the mandate. It turns out that they are considering.
Amazon’s high-risk strategy
This type of “backdoor firing,” as Bloom calls it, is already causing uproar in other workplaces. A survey of more than 1,500 U.S. managers published in May by BambooHR found that about a quarter of executives expect employees to voluntarily leave after the RTO mandate is implemented. I answered yes. When AT&T required its 60,000 employees in nine of its 350 offices to return to in-person work, some employees parlayed the push into saying they were unable or uninterested in moving into the office. I interpreted it as a way to exclude employees. CEO John Stankey estimated that 15% of the affected workforce, or about 9,000 people, would face the choice of relocating or leaving the company entirely.
“This is a fired wolf in sheep’s clothing coming back to the office,” an anonymous AT&T employee told Bloomberg.
Sneaky termination strategies don’t always work out well for employers. According to Unispace’s 2023 report, nearly half of employers with RTO policies saw higher-than-expected employee attrition. Approximately 30% reported difficulty in recruitment.
Amazon would face the same risks, Elliott argued. Other tech companies may maintain flexible work policies as a way to poach Amazon’s talent, and Amazon could struggle to hire new employees, he said. This talent pool shrinks even more for women who need flexibility to raise children and for managers who can use their experience to find easier work elsewhere.
“We’re going to lose some people within the organization,” Elliott said. “High performance is lost.”