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In the survey conducted by ResumeTemplates in the first week of September, one in 10 company leaders said they are increasing RTO days to drive employees to quit, with half citing it as a strategy to avoid layoffs.
In mid-September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company is ending its hybrid work policy — extending a requirement to work from the office at least three days a week to five days a week after New Year’s Day.
Employees immediately took to social media to protest the mandate. “Amazon has announced 5 day RTO, which is unfortunate because I’m interested in working for a living, not live-action role playing and virtue signaling,” CJ Felli, a system development engineer for Amazon Web Services, wrote on LinkedIn. “If you have remote opportunities available, please message me. Nothing is off the table. I’d rather go back to school than work in an office again.”
Andy Jassy
Tamia Reed, a data center technician at Amazon Web Services also took to LinkedIn to share her dismay over the new policy. “For many of us, remote work was not just a convenience but a necessary shift towards a more flexible and balanced professional life. This abrupt change undermines the progress we’ve made in embracing diverse work styles and accommodating different personal needs,” Reed wrote. “I hope Amazon will reconsider and find a way to support both their business needs and their employees’ diverse work preferences.”
Jassy said the five-day-a-week mandate is meant to help foster collaboration seen pre-pandemic, making it easier for team members to “learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture.”
But others saw the move more as an effort to force staff to quit. A new survey of more than 1,550 business leaders about their company’s return to work strategy for 2024 and 2025 supports this presumption, finding it to be a motivating factor in mandating more RTO days for a number of them. In the survey conducted by ResumeTemplates in the first week of September, one in 10 company leaders said they are increasing RTO days to drive employees to quit, with half citing it as a strategy to avoid layoffs.
The Trust Factor
“There are many factors behind why a company might increase RTO,” ResumeTemplate Chief Career Strategist Julia Toothacre said in a press release. “One of the main ones, which most companies are reluctant to admit, but did reveal in this poll, is the hope that employees will quit, allowing them to avoid layoffs.” Toothacre cited other reasons that may play into the stricter RTO policies: Many companies own buildings or have long-term lease contracts and want to make use of the space. And it can also be a trust issue: After experiencing a few employees taking advantage of working from home, she said, companies “assume all employees are doing the same.”
Brian Elliott
Brian Elliott, future of work advisor and author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives, weighed in on the trust factor. Strict RTO mandates, he told Fortune, can undermine management’s trust and confidence in their employees. It sends a message to employees that management is looking for control, especially if there is a lack of internal data that proves more time spent in the office results in greater productivity.
“What Amazon’s done by going from three days a week to five days a week for a lot of employees is basically a signal: We don’t trust you to be working effectively when you’re at home,” Elliott said.
In the ResumeTemplate survey, more than one-quarter of companies said they have increased RTO days in 2024, 12 percent plan to by the end of this year, and 9 percent will increase them by 2025. Of these companies, one in three will require employees to be in the office five days a week.
RTO in the Business Events Industry
The stricter RTO policies align with the findings of Convene’s recent Annual Salary Survey (full results to be published in our September/October print issue and online shortly). According to our survey of 462 event professionals in May and June, nearly nine out of 10 planners said their employers have a flexible work policy — the same percent as last year. But this year, only three out of 10 — versus two out of five last year — said they get to decide when to work from home and when to go to the office. Thirty-seven percent have a fixed schedule of two to three days in the office.
We have a lot of data and research that does support that high-performing organizations today are those that are innovating how they work and not going back to models we know that broke five years ago.”
Going Backwards
A majority of companies — three in five — surveyed by ResumeTemplate admit they are ignoring employee preferences for hybrid or remote work. The main reason company leaders said they are increasing in-work office days is to boost productivity, but Toothacre said that runs counter to actual experience. “Increasing RTO won’t increase productivity,” she said. “Employees who have to commute are likely to arrive at the office tired and frustrated … taking longer to settle into their day. Not only that, but some employees will need to arrange care for pets and/or family members, increasing both pressure and costs. Productivity depends on clear expectations and communication, not time in the office — unless the position requires it. This strategy will definitely get people to quit, but not necessarily the right people. Are leaders willing to lose their most productive and top talent just to get everyone back in the office? It’s a risky strategy that may backfire for companies.”
Kelly Monahan, managing director of freelance platform Upwork’s Research Institute, also disputes the perception that more time in the office results in better returns. “We are at a critical point right now within our organizations that we have to start innovating how we’re working,” she told Fortune. “We have a lot of data and research that does support that high-performing organizations today are those that are innovating how they work and not going back to models we know that broke five years ago.”
With flexible or hybrid work continuing to be favored by the majority of white-collar workers, Amazon could find its new policy makes it more difficult to attract new hires, Elliott told Fortune. “If 80 percent of people want some form of flexibility, then you’ve got a bit of a challenge on your hands in terms of the talent pool from which you have to recruit,” he said. “We know that these shifts cause you to lose people. It is also much harder to attract people into work.”
Even four years into the pandemic’s onset, said Rob Sadow, CEO of remote work platform Scoop, we are still navigating the future of work. “People thought we were like in the eighth inning of this discussion,” Sadow told Fortune. “We’re more in, like, the third inning.”
Michelle Russell is editor in chief of Convene.