Are stricter return-to-work regulations reasonable?

In mid-September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that the company would end its hybrid work policy — extending working in the office at least three days a week to five days a week after New Year’s Day.

Employees immediately protested the rule on social media. CJ Felli, a systems development engineer at Amazon Web Services, wrote on LinkedIn: “Amazon’s announcement of a five-day return to work schedule is unfortunate because I’m interested in work, not real-life role play and virtue parading. If you have remote work opportunities, please message me. Everything is possible. I would rather go back to school than work in an office again.”

Andy Jassy

Tamia Reed, a data center technician at Amazon Web Services, also expressed her dissatisfaction with the new policy on LinkedIn. “For many of us, remote work is not only a convenience, but a necessary shift toward a more flexible and balanced work life. This abrupt change undermines the progress we have made in embracing diverse work styles and meeting different individual needs,” Reed wrote. “I hope Amazon will reconsider and find a way to support their business needs and the diverse work preferences of their employees.”

Jassy said the five-day workweek was intended to help foster pre-pandemic collaboration and make it easier for team members to “learn, model, practice and reinforce our culture.”

But others see the move as more about forcing employees to quit. A new survey of more than 1,550 business leaders about their companies’ return-to-work strategies for 2024 and 2025 supports this hypothesis, finding that this is the motivation for many businesses to increase RTO days. In the ResumeTemplates survey conducted in the first week of September, one in ten company leaders said they increased RTO days to force employees to quit, with half of them seeing it as a strategy to avoid layoffs.

Trust Factor

“There are many factors behind companies increasing RTOs,” Julia Toothacre, chief career strategist at ResumeTemplate, said in a press release. “Most companies don’t want to admit it, but one of the main reasons revealed in this survey is that they want employees to quit so they can avoid layoffs.” Toothacre cited other reasons that may lead to stricter RTO policies: Many companies own office buildings or have long-term leases and want to utilize those spaces. It may also be a trust issue: After experiencing some employees taking advantage of working from home, companies “assume that all employees are doing it,” she said.

Brian Elliott

Brian Elliott, Future of Work consultant and author of How the future works: Leading agile teams to do the best work of a lifetime, The trust factor also plays a role. He told wealthwhich can erode management’s trust and confidence in employees. It sends the message to employees that management is seeking control, especially in the absence of internal data proving that more time spent in the office leads to higher productivity.

“Amazon has increased the work week for many employees from three days to five days, which is actually sending a signal: we don’t trust you to work effectively from home,” Elliott said.

More than a quarter of companies in the ResumeTemplate survey said they had already increased RTO days by 2024, 12% planned to increase RTO days by the end of this year, and 9% would increase RTO days by 2025. Of these companies, a third will require employees to work in the office five days a week.

RTOs in the business events industry

Stricter RTO policies are consistent with the following research findings: ConveningAccording to our most recent annual salary survey (full results will be published in the September/October print and online edition). Nearly 90% of planners said their employers have a flexible working policy – ​​the same percentage as last year, according to our survey of 462 event professionals in May and June. But this year, only 30% (down from two-fifths last year) said they can decide when to work from home and when to go to the office. 37% have two or three fixed working days.