Amazon’s return-to-office policy announced last month, which will require employees to work in-person five days a week starting in 2025, has already irked employees. Some have even started “rage-applying” for new positions because they wanted to stick with the tech company. The problem for them is that this could be exactly the answer Amazon was hoping for.
The tech giant’s strict RTO push could be a sneaky way to fire employees, say some experts on the future of work. Amazon probably already knows that the new policy will push out disgruntled employees, meaning the company will no longer have to go through the difficult process of formal layoffs. As a trade-off, the RTO crusade could come at the expense of the company’s own talent and technological advancements.
“Amazon probably felt that they would rather control costs by reducing their workforce and cushioning the blow from technology and innovation,” Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom told me. Business insider.
The company can be content to sacrifice a little brain drain. The RTO’s crackdown was accompanied by a call from CEO Andy Jassy for a reduction in the number of managers and a 15% increase in the ratio of employees to managers by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Amazon said the RTO shift is an effort to strengthen company culture and that the company has no plans to reduce its workforce.
Brian Elliott, future of work consultant and author of How the future works: Leading agile teams to do the best work of their livesAgree with Bloom. He told Fortune Amazon will “undoubtedly” see employee turnover as a result of the mandate, as it remains deeply unpopular among most American workers.
“The vast majority of people want something in the middle: They want to spend a few days a week together that are meaningful to their teams,” he said. “And besides, the people who are deprived of flexibility are much more likely to jump ship.”
A survey by HR consultancy Robert Half conducted last month found that 39% of office workers in Australia would quit if their company cut back on flexible working. Amazon employees are already amplifying this statistic. Anonymous job rating site Blind, which surveyed 2,585 verified Amazon employees a day after Jassy’s RTO announcement, found that 73% of employees were considering quitting their jobs as a result of the mandate.
Amazon’s risky strategy
These “backdoor layoffs,” as Bloom calls them, have already made an impact in other workplaces. According to research from BambooHR published in May of more than 1,500 U.S. managers, about a quarter of managers said they hoped employees would voluntarily leave the company after the implementation of an RTO mandate. When AT&T re-ordered its 60,000 employees in nine of its 350 offices to return to in-person work, some employees interpreted the push as a way to eliminate employees who were unable or uninterested in moving 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 altogether.
“It’s a fired wolf in sheep’s clothing returning to the office,” an anonymous AT&T employee told Bloomberg.
The sneaky dismissal strategy hasn’t always worked for employers. According to a 2023 report from Unispace, nearly half of employers who implemented RTO policies saw higher-than-expected employee turnover. Nearly 30% reported recruitment problems.
Amazon will face the same risk, Elliott argued. Other tech companies may keep their flexible working policies as a means of poaching Amazon’s talent, and Amazon could struggle to hire new faces, he said. This talent pool shrinks even more for women, who may need flexibility in childcare, and for managers, who can use their experience to find better jobs elsewhere.
“You lose some people in your organization,” Elliott said. “You lose high performance.”
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
