How will Amazon’s strict RTO policy impact workers?

Last week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced a sweeping change in company policy: Come January 2, 2025, almost all employees will be expected to work in an Amazon office in person, five days a week. 

The policy change, which Jassy says is intended to “strengthen our culture and teams,” has led to a well-documented uproar among Amazon employees.

The e-commerce giant has steadily shifted its remote-work policy over the past several years. During the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Amazon (like many companies) operated virtually. Then, Amazon empowered managers to dictate where their reports were allowed to work from. More recently, Amazon mandated that its employees work three days per week in person. 

Now many Amazon employees who find the five-day return-to-office (RTO) policy to be draconian are speaking out. One wrote over Slack that the policy is “more strict and out of its mind than many teams operated under pre-covid.”

The January mandate gives employees less than four months to figure out their next move. To be sure, they are not alone. Back in February, UPS announced that its employees would be expected to work from an office five days per week. And many leaders are pushing employees to work from the office more often. But Amazon is one of the largest publicly traded companies to enforce such a strict five-day RTO—and workers and leaders alike are watching. 

The question that remains: What impact will such policies have? Fast Company spoke with four workplace experts about how a five-day RTO mandate could affect worker retention, engagement, and more. 

Representatives for Amazon declined to comment beyond Jassy’s original statement. 

Will Amazon’s culture improve?

Jassy framed his RTO policy decision as a way to improve the company’s workplace culture. In his announcement, he said that Amazon would be eliminating many managerial roles to flatten the company’s organization chart. He also argued that this would strengthen the company’s culture and induce greater collaboration.

Research appears to be split about how in-person work policies impact culture. A 2023 study from Harvard, University of Iowa, and Federal Reserve researchers suggests that in-person work leads to more rich digital conversations, in-person contact, and on-the-job training. So the impulse to return to more in-person work in hopes of fostering greater in-office partnerships could be warranted. However, other reports have found that companies whose employees are allowed to work where they want to rank higher in terms of workplace culture.

Keith Giarman, managing director of executive search firm DHR Global, works on the company’s private equity practice and also sits on the company’s executive committee. Through these roles, Giarman sees much of the ins-and-outs of his company’s personnel policy. He says RTO pushes are a double-edged sword. Knowledge workers can benefit from time away from the office, he argues, but there is a fundamental loss of company culture. 

“When workers get together, they build relationships more deeply, and that has a significant financial benefit for us,” Giarman says. “Because in our kind of business, partnering with each other is what wins the war. You can do it on Zoom, but you [work better] with people that you organically build relationships with over time.”

Reacting to the Amazon RTO news, Giarman understands Jassy’s impulse and reveals that he actually knows the Amazon CEO, though admittedly not well: Giarman helped tap Jassy as an honoree for the Harvard Business School Alumni Association. Giarman tries to put himself in Jassy’s shoes. 

“I can imagine that [Jassy] is looking at it and thinking, you know, I need a culture where people are committed to this place,” Giarman says. “It’s hard to imagine you can do your job without physically being there to interact and innovate with people on the team.”

Others are less inclined to believe that an RTO push will improve Amazon’s culture. Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh, has studied RTO mandates extensively. He calls Jassy’s move “extreme,” citing Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom’s study, which determined that hybrid work boosts an organization’s profits.

Beyond economic factors, though, Ma argues that a five-day RTO policy can cause a negative shift in workplace culture, noting that while there may be short-term outrage from Amazon employees, in the long term, a broader grievance with corporate leadership will likely blossom. 

“Employees view it as the managers are telling them, ‘I do not trust you,’” Ma says. “This sends a really bad signal to the employee. The employee will become less motivated.”

A keystone of Amazon’s cultural philosophy is a self-proclaimed “Day One” mentality. The company states that it wants employees to act like they’re on the first day of launching a startup—even if they’re working at a firm of 1.5 million employees. In his memo, Jassy writes that he wants Amazon “to operate like the world’s largest startup,” fostering a workplace of “strong urgency” and “high ownership.” 

Ma takes aim at this idea. He calls it a “top-management fantasy.” Ma argues that in demanding employees act like they’re working for an early-stage startup, Amazon’s leadership ignores the needs of its employees, leading to policies such as the RTO push. 

“If it’s a day one mentality, why doesn’t the CEO go back to the garage where Jeff Bezos founded his business?” Ma jokes. “The big reason why startup teams have such a day one mentality is because they have incentives to take risks. However, the current employees do not have such economic incentives.”

Will workers quit?

Some experts say that forcing teams to work from the office five days per week could cause an exodus of employees. Knowing that they can find work at other companies that won’t make the same demand, some employees may choose to leave Amazon behind.

Of course, this could be by design. According to a recent Bamboo HR survey, 25% of business leaders admitted that they hoped that forcing workers to return to the office would induce voluntary turnover. That same poll also found that 37% of leaders believe their organization enacted layoffs because fewer employees than expected quit during their RTO.

Indeed, it can be difficult to predict which employees will quit over new in-person work policies. For instance, Ma suggests that experienced workers with in-demand skills are the most likely to leave. Plus, the most talented employees are most able to channel their dissatisfaction into finding a new position. Thus, Ma asserts that an RTO push could cause an unintended “brain drain.”

“Those who are able to find a new job are the good employees you do not want to lose,” Ma says. “When you do a layoff, you are laying off the low-performing employees. Those who will leave as a result of an RTO are better employees you want to keep.” 

Others suggest that employees who have moved away from central office locations are the most likely to quit because of a new RTO policy. “The real reason leaders are trying to force workers to return to the office is not because they actually believe it will make teams more productive, but rather because they want their workers to quit,” wrote entrepreneur Matt Higgins for Fast Company in 2023. “As a CEO myself, I strongly believe CEOs know exactly which employees will self-select out of a job. For instance, it’s not hard to deduce that someone who moved their whole family from New York to Whitefish, Montana, is probably going to find another way to survive.”

What will happen to workers who have relocated?

Indeed, hiring remote workers can be a key solution to filling talent gaps. As the former chief revenue officer of Spotify and a former VP at Google, Jeff Levick has witnessed how in-person tech workplaces operate. Now, as CEO of freelance marketplace We Are Rosie, Levick works with 30,000 high-demand gig workers, many of whom work virtually. The experience has opened his eyes to the wide array of talent that simply won’t stay on board with an RTO demand.   

“​​That’s the benefit of remote: You truly open up the ability to find the best people,” Levick says. “That’s our view of what makes our business successful, and also what makes our clients successful, is that our job is to find the best people. We don’t care where they live.”

In thinking about the possibility of an Amazon exodus post-RTO, Levick asks a question: Who is most dependent on the flexibility of hybrid and remote work? One group, he says, is working moms. 

Thanks to flexible work policies, working moms “can take their kids to school, they can pick them up. If they have to take an hour for a doctor’s appointment, they can do that too,” says Levick. “We’re going backwards in terms of supporting families, meeting them where they are and also making a living.”

On the other hand, Vivek Ghosal, a professor of economics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, does not believe a significant number of Amazon workers will jump ship post-RTO. Given recent high-profile layoffs at Big Tech companies, Amazon workers may think they have nowhere to go. 

Due to the current mixed labor market, workers’ “options are limited,” Ghosal says. “If Amazon did this in 2022, people would just take off. But now I think it’s more difficult.”

Thus, maybe Amazon won’t see staggering quit rates, as some expect. Undoubtedly, some workers will stay unhappily, dampening the workplace culture that Jassy is striving for. Unhappy, unsatisfied workers are neither productive nor top-notch employees.

“With certainty, many workers will be miserable,” Ghosal says. “It creates problems for their mindset. There are mental health issues, stress issues. Many workers have families. . . . Some may have to move, buy and sell houses, or go somewhere else and rent to adjust, and that is costly.”

Amazon’s RTO model

Exactly how Amazon’s strict RTO policy will impact the workers at one of the world’s most powerful companies remains to be seen. Will the move substantially shift Amazon’s workplace culture? Will employees leave? These questions can only be answered in time. Leaders across sectors will be watching Amazon’s example carefully.

DHR’s Giarman says that the debate about where employees should work is here to stay, noting, “I do not think it’s going away anytime soon.”

In such workplace debates, the term new normal frequently flies around. But most companies haven’t yet reached a permanent state of normalcy. Both economists, Ma and Ghosal believe an equilibrium is in sight. 

Ma sees Amazon as an outlier. American companies will, per his view, reach a steady point of hybrid work. “On the macro level, more teams will try to make RTO mandates, though not necessarily five days, and at the same time, a lot of companies will cancel their RTO mandates,” Ma says. “I believe the equilibrium for most teams will be hybrid.” 

Ghosal emphasizes that most firms are rethinking remote-work policies right now and predicts that a new baseline of how much of the workforce operates remotely will be established by “the end of spring 2025.”