Amazon’s back-to-the-office policy announced in September, mandating five days of in-person work per week beginning in 2025, has angered workers. Some have begun to “rage-apply” for new positions, preferring to stick with a tech company. Their problem is: That might be the answer Amazon was hoping for.
The technology mammoth’s strict RTO push could be a sly means of laying off workers, some future-of-work experts say. Amazon probably already knows that the new policy will drive out disgruntled workers, meaning the company no longer has to go through the arduous process of formal layoffs. As a trade-off, the RTO crusade may come at the expense of the company’s own talent and technological advances.
“Amazon may think it can control costs by reducing headcount and capitalizing on the success of technology and innovation,” said Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom. Business Insider.
The company may be satisfied with sacrificing some brain drain. The RTO crackdown comes alongside CEO Andy Jassey’s call to cut managers and raise the ratio of workers to managers to 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Amazon has said its RTO change is an effort to strengthen the company’s culture and that the company has no plans to reduce its workforce.
Brian Elliott, Future Work Consultant and Author How the future works: Leading flexible teams to do the best work of their livesBloom agreed. He said Good luck Amazon will “undoubtedly” see the employee’s protest as a result because it is widely unpopular with most American workers.
“Most people want something in the middle: They want two days a week together that are meaningful with their teams,” he said. “And because flexibility is taken away from those people, there’s a greater chance of jumping ship.”
A survey by human resources consultancy Robert Hoff last month found that 39% of office workers in Australia would quit if their company cut back on flexible working. Amazon employees have already reinforced that statistic. Anonymous job review site Blind, which surveyed 2,585 verified Amazon workers a day after Jassi’s RTO announcement, found that 73% of employees would quit their jobs as a result of the order.
Amazon’s High-Risk Strategy
As Bloom notes, these “backdoor layoffs” have already made a splash in other workplaces. According to research by BambooHR published in May that surveyed more than 1,500 US managers, a quarter of executives said they believed employees would voluntarily leave the company after the RTO mandate was implemented. When AT&T forced 60,000 workers in nine of its 350 offices to return to in-person work, some employees interpreted the push as a way to get rid of workers who couldn’t or weren’t interested in relocating to their offices. CEO John Stankey estimated that 15% of the affected workforce, about 9,000 employees, would face the choice of relocating or leaving the company entirely.
“This is a fired wolf in sheep’s clothing returning to the office,” an anonymous AT&T employee told Bloomberg.
Tricky layoff tactics don’t always work for employers. According to Unispace’s 2023 report, half of employers who implemented RTO policies saw higher-than-expected headcount. Almost 30% reported recruitment problems.
Amazon faces the same risk, Elliott argued. Other tech companies may keep their flexible work policies as a means of poaching Amazon’s talent, and Amazon may struggle to hire new faces, he said. The talent pool shrinks even further for women who may need flexibility for childcare and for managers who can use experience to find cushier work elsewhere.
“You lose some people in your company,” Elliott said. “You lose a lot of efficiency.”
A version of this story was originally published on Fortune.com on October 2, 2024.
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