What if Andy Jassy's RTO Mandate Was About Customers?
What if Andy Jassy’s RTO Mandate was About Customers? Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, announced on September 16 that all employees must return to the office 5 days a week: “… we believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. I’ve previously explained these benefits (February 2023 post), but in summary, we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and teams tend to be better connected to one another.” Now, imagine if Mr. Jassy proclaimed his belief that Amazon’s customer culture would improve if customers were forced to go to Amazon pick-up points to get their packages, defying customer preferences for home delivery. Amazon’s investors and board of directors would demand an evidence-based explanation for a decision about customers. Yet, decisions about work are too-often accepted without question, based on intuition, opinion and personal beliefs. Mr. Jassy’s February 17, 2024 memo stated:?“S-teams listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach.”?Business Insider described a leaked August 2023 transcript where Mr. Jassy called the mandate a “judgment call” similar to past decisions made without data, like the launch of Amazon Web Services cloud unit.?He said the leadership didn't like the "actual results of our businesses" through a "significant chunk of time."?He spoke to "60 to 80 CEOs of other companies” and "virtually all of them" preferred in-office work.? Was Mr. Jassy forced to rely on observation, judgment and opinion, because there’s no evidence? My Google Scholar search on “return to work policy” revealed 17,800 scholarly citations, just since 2023. Nick Bloom noted: “This is almost exactly the reverse of the hybrid experiment on Trip published in Nature in June 2024 https://lnkd.in/gQjPAEHD. This moved in the opposite direction – from 5-days to 3-days hybrid – and saw a 35% drop in quit rates. So, I guess Amazon quit rates will rise by perhaps 30%.”?? As predicted, Amazon employees are leaving, and departing employees may be the best ones. Work is too important for “judgment calls.” In "Beyond HR," Pete Ramstad and I proposed: Leaders can and should be held accountable for the quality of their decisions about talent, work and organizations, just as they are held accountable for the quality of their decisions about money, customers, and technology. Unfortunately, leaders are seldom taught decision principles about work (How many MBA classes deal with work, versus money and customers?), and even more rarely are held accountable.? Boards, investors and stakeholders should demand better, or work, workers, organizations – and company performance – will continue to suffer needlessly.