Amazon's Return-to-Office Mandate: A Step Backward in Modern Leadership?

Amazon's decision to return to a 5-day in-office schedule in 2025, as announced by CEO Andy Jassy, marks a significant shift in its workplace strategy. Citing Amazon's distinctive culture as a key reason for his tenure, Jassy argues that the return is necessary to preserve what made the company thrive. Yet, this decision could have broader implications not only for Amazon but for the evolving landscape of work in tech. This decision isn't just about internal operations at Amazon, but sends ripples across the tech industry, where hybrid work models have increasingly become the norm.

I don't pretend to know how Amazon operates internally, nor do I know any other information that has been shared outside of the e-mail, which was released. So based on what I do get to see, this seems to be another disappointing example of leadership. While opinionated and somewhat biased against this move, I intend to showcase why this isn't great leadership below.

Lacking Data

What’s striking about this decision is the lack of data used to support it. This same memo (indirectly) says they are looking to lay off some middle managers to increase their margins. It states clearly that they want the manager to individual contributor ratio to increase by 15%. While the reasoning lacks data and details, they at least provide some guidance into what they're looking to achieve. However, when it comes to the return-to-office mandate, there's no mention of data supporting this decision or outlining its expected outcomes. Instead, Jassy waxes on about his past with the company, his appreciation for the culture it had, and a need for people to "be joined at the hip" in order to invent. High-quality leadership entails the use of data to support decisions and to set targets for outcomes you're looking to achieve. This lack of data fosters the perception that the decision was made to align with leadership's comfort rather than the company's actual needs. A lack of measurement and a goal to achieve means there is also no information being collected that will allow them to change or reverse course if this decision doesn't yield expected results.

While the memo lacks concrete data to support this significant change, it's worth examining the company's performance during the remote work era to put this decision into context. Since 2020, Amazon has:

• managed to increase their revenues by 22% at the end of fiscal 2023 and they've increased again in 2024.
• The stock price has a little more than doubled between January 1, 2020 and September 16, 2024.
• The company is a leading innovator to all things AI, building and releasing a suite of tools to help build models, integrate them into applications, and provide assistants to simplify work - reducing the amount of time it can take to perform 30,000 Java JDK upgrades from 4,500 developer years to just a few months.

This is in addition to the generalized comments Jassy makes at the beginning of his note and this has all been accomplished while the company worked in remote or hybrid formats. This doesn't sound like an environment that is lacking speed, ideation, creativity, or an ability to deliver compared to 2019. In fact, Jassy goes so far as to state how what they've accomplished "is hard to do." Not that it's hard to do in a remote or hybrid world, but rather it's simply hard to do regardless of how work is being executed. It would have been prudent for Amazon to provide data about the specific challenges of remote work—such as collaboration difficulties or productivity drops—if these issues were, in fact, driving this decision and the data they used which will mark the measurement for future success.

Lost Touch With Reality

It raises concern when a CEO appears overly nostalgic for past practices, potentially overlooking the realities of today's workforce. It leads me to believe that (s)he's become too isolated from what is truly going on with the world at large and may not have the correct information needed to guide us into the future. This memo tends to only reinforce those beliefs. As leaders, it is imperative for us to stay aware of the current lives and experiences of our teams, not just what we remember life was like when we were at their levels. There needs to be recognition of how the world has changed around us. While Jassy acknowledges the success of the company over the last 4 years, it appears he fails to truly recognize that this success has come tied with the way the world has changed in how day to day work is executed. In fact, he states that they think they can improve how they operate and strengthen their culture by going back to how things were pre-pandemic. There is a love and appreciation for how customer-focused the company and employees are, yet a lack of recognition that the decisions the leadership has made up to this point to attend to the needs of its workforce has also been a reason for those results. Wise and successful leaders the likes of J.W. Marriott Jr. and Richard Branson have and continue to say "Take care of your employees and they will take care of your (customer or business)." Jassy’s reference to Amazon as 'the largest startup' is increasingly irrelevant in a world where even startups thrive with hybrid or fully remote models. Amazon helped build technology and foundations that made remote work possible and successful. The company's teams likely work globally, not locally, so what improvements are achieved by forcing office attendance if everyone going to end up meeting on a conference call with remotely located teams to do their work? Also, how might having to go into an office interfere with it?

Lack of Humanity

I've been through numerous leadership courses in my career to ensure I'm building and sharpening my skills. I've yet to ever be in a course that doesn't talk about trust and treating your employees like adults. As executives ascend to the C-Suite, there's often a tendency to withhold full transparency under the guise of protecting the company. This can erode trust between leadership and employees. Many companies, driven by PR and legal concerns, adopt rigid communication strategies, which can feel overly controlling and out of touch with employees' needs.

I do want to provide some credit here - the memo was clear that Amazon will maintain some flexibility for personal matters, as it did pre-pandemic. So it's not like this move is completely archaic. However, the memo comes across as detached and lacking empathy, especially considering current workforce preferences. According to Gallup, 53% of remote-capable employees in the U.S. work in a hybrid model, 27% work remotely, and only 21% work on-site. More tellingly, 60% of remote-capable employees prefer hybrid work, while 25% prefer remote work, and a mere 7% prefer on-site work. Amazon's decision seems to ignore these clear employee preferences, potentially alienating a significant portion of their workforce.

Leading with humanity requires empathy, open communication, and collaboration. In PwC's 2024 'Trust in US Business Survey' they state, "42% of executives cite productivity as the biggest risk if employees don't trust their employer, along with the quality of products and services (41%), operational efficiencies (40%) and — again — profitability (38%)." Failing to trust and clearly communicate risks immediate negative impacts within the company, and I'm not sure how much this decision takes into account what the employees need or are going through. The messaging is vague, again lacking data and goals that support the decisions, nor does any part of this show an effort to partner with employees and show they're valued to help reach the best answers possible. By disregarding the clear preferences of the majority of workers, Amazon risks damaging the trust and engagement of its employees, potentially leading to the very productivity and quality issues they seem to be trying to avoid.

Unintended Cultural Consequences

This is the big one for me. While possibly unintended, the message employees may interpret is: 'Despite your strong performance, we don't fully trust that remote work is delivering the productivity we expect, so we're mandating a full-time return to the office.' This sows the seeds of mistrust and will likely cause the culture to weaken, rather than strengthen over the long-term. Over the short-term, maybe things do go well. The job market is tight and getting tighter, so people are afraid to lose jobs, but over the long-term a lack of trust will rot culture from the inside. People will find their own ways to work around rules they don't like or won't follow - for example, they maybe need to be in the office 5 days a week, but no one said for how long. This is how the coffee badging trend began. It will then force monitoring, which brought in mouse jigglers, and disciplinary actions for those who don't follow rules instead of focusing on and rewarding work output and results. Over time, people will become more disgruntled, less focused on the customer, and more likely to leave. The belief that reverting to pre-pandemic practices will resolve underlying issues is, at best, a misunderstanding of how work dynamics have evolved. The costs could be much greater than realized, even if your company is Amazon.

Conclusion

There has been a major shift in how work gets completed because of the pandemic and improvements in technology. As such, the workforce has enjoyed an opportunity for flexibility while also proving they can deliver on work expectations and the company can prosper. Amazon's choice to mandate a 5 day work week in the office is a dramatic risk to their own success and could influence other employers to follow suit. While there are clear benefits to in-office work in the right situations, there is more risk to destroying trust in the leadership and the negative impacts that go with that loss of trust than there are for decisions that do not have support in data or have goals to measure success against. It is imperative that executives listen to their employees, set clear goals, and stay in touch with the changes in work environments or they risk a workforce that doesn't care and a business that struggles to succeed.