Is Amazon signaling the end of remote work?

Many looked at the tech giant’s return to office mandate as a death knell for hybrid work. In reality, it is affecting the future of remote work in more ways than one.

On the last Monday of September, as Amazon employees were waking up to begin yet another work week, they were met with a startling morning announcement. 

In a company memo shared with employees, CEO Andy Jassy announced that starting from early 2025, all corporate staffers would be required to spend five days a week in the office. The decision marked a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier hybrid model, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week, and ended the company’s journey with remote work which had begun early at the onset of the pandemic. 

Employees will be expected to be in the office five days a week “outside of extenuating circumstances or unless they have been granted an exception by their organisation’s S-team leader”, Jassy declared, referring to the close-knit group of executives that report to Amazon’s CEO.

Cue the alarm bells, with most analysts seeing this as the beginning of the end for the flexible, home-office life around the world.

You may have noticed that when talking about remote work, the conversation almost always ends up in a binary. Ηybrid working arrangements are either here to stay and radically transform the way we work, or they are a remnant of the pandemic era that all companies will slowly choose to move away from. The recent news coming from Amazon’s headquarters ferociously pulled the needle in the last direction.

In a sense, it makes sense why many people saw Amazon’s flagship decision as a harbinger of change. For starters, it wasn’t just a one-off decision: over the past year, several other giants, from Dell to AT&T, have mandated a return to the office. Given the massive scale of the company, as well as the fact that Amazon was one of the first companies that transitioned into fully remote during the pandemic (and truly thrived) many wondered whether the company’s return-to-office (RTO) policy was the death knell for remote or hybrid work as we knew it.

But before we start writing obituaries for hybrid and remote work, we should probably slow down and take a closer look at what’s really going on here. Yes, Amazon’s decision will have a wider impact on the hybrid work model, but not necessarily the one you think. In fact, defying people’s binary expectations, the tech giant’s RTO mandate is affecting the future of remote work in more ways than one.  So let’s take a deeper look at the state of the hybrid model, and what to actually expect from the recent announcement that shook the waters around the world.

📈A clear trend, not just an Amazon story

Let’s start with a necessary admission: whether you are a hybrid enthusiast or a remote scepticist, it is abundantly clear that Amazon’s decision isn’t happening in isolation. In fact, it's following a script that many large companies have been reading from in 2024.

Just a few days after the notorious Amazon announcement, Dell Technologies also released a memo instructing its global sales team to start clocking five days a week in the office, instead of three. "Working remotely should be the exception rather than the routine," the announcement read, adding that the change was meant to increase collaboration and skills growth, which requires the team to be in the office. What is more, unlike Amazon’s generous time window for adaption, Dell employees were simply given one week to adhere to the new policy.

There’s also the example of AT&T, who like many other companies announced last year that it was consolidating offices and requiring managers to work on site at least three days a week. The kicker here: a lot of employees actually had to relocate or quit if their local office shut down, leading to a considerable decrease in staff.

Lastly, there is JPMorgan Chase, the flagbearer of RTO mandates. The majority of its employees are already working in the office five days a week, following one of the earliest return mandates implemented already in 2021 when the pandemic was still at its peak. But that didn’t prevent CEO Jamie Dimon from publicly expressing his displeasure, just ten days ago, that more government employees weren’t working on site in federal buildings, and repeating his view that remote work is suppressing “spontaneous idea generation” and is incompatible with managing a team

These moves definitely feel like a coordinated chorus: big business doesn’t love remote work anymore, and it is being unusually vocal about it. Emboldened by Amazon’s move and the publicity it generated, many companies are following suit. But as Newton’s third law would have it, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. And in the case of hybrid work, a pull from it may also be accompanied by a further push.

🫶Too popular to ditch: the hybrid tug of war

Herein lies the second admission: while Amazon and other corporate titans are tightening the screws on remote work, hybrid work remains too popular to ditch entirely. Companies may not admit it outright, but the desire for flexibility isn’t just a fringe demand—it’s at the epicentre of what top talent wants. As the data points out, this doesn’t show signs of changing anytime soon: most studies suggest that as many as 8 in 10 employees strongly prefer a hybrid work model in 2024.

Just take a look at some reactions by Amazon’s own employees, such as Laura, who shared her frustration with the decision, and has been fervently updating her resume and portfolio and applying for new jobs on LinkedIn. Several Amazon employees told Fortune they are actively seeking new opportunities following the RTO mandate, one employee having already handed in their notice, while another saying they had already received two interview offers within 48 hours of the announcement. 

To take things even further, a new study by digital PR agency Reboot Online reveals a massive surge in online searches for "legal right to work from home" over the past week.

Then there is also the resistance and difficulty for Amazon to even begin enforcing its own mandate internally among its subsidiaries. Twitch for example, which was acquired by Amazon in 2014, already announced that it will not adhere to the company's newly announced five-day-a-week return-to-office policy, which is set to take effect in January. The streaming platform’s CEO Dan Clancy stated in an internal email that the company will continue to be an exception, adding that “we simply do not have the space to host all employees in our office spaces”.

All these signs show that hybrid work remains too popular with most employees, as well as with some notable corporate leaders. We know that the competitive market for talent works both ways, and it is very quick to fill in a void. So as companies like Amazon cut down remote work options, their direct competitors will lean even harder into promoting hybrid and remote work to attract disappointed talent, and may even use it as a recruitment opportunity. There is no doubt, for example, that Microsoft's hybrid work policy just became even more enticing to top tech talent.

There is also a third likely reaction, one that applies to companies that want to maintain the popular benefit of hybrid work, but are keen to bring people back to their offices for more time than they currently spend.

Brian Elliott, a former Slack exec turned work consultant, put it succinctly. “Two days in the office becomes three. And three days becomes four. Companies can make these moves and say: ‘We’re not as bad as Amazon though”.

So the recent return mandates may create the space for a balancing act: companies may subtly push for more in-office days, but without scaring away talent by becoming full RTO hardliners. 

🌎The state of remote: a numbers game

If you are truly wondering about the future of hybrid work, then move your glance away from singular company mandates and take a look at the data. Remote work isn’t disappearing; it’s just levelling out. Post-pandemic, the number of US workers spending time remotely took a noticeable fall, but it has settled at about 25-30% of their workweek for the past two years. 

Yes, there are some dips and a subtle downward slope since 2022, but the trend is far less dramatic than the headlines suggest. Additionally, consistent with our previous observation, when there are falls there have also been consistent bounce backs: a further sign that following its fall, companies may be coming in to offer more hybrid work arrangements and lure employees.

In addition to that, the trends for hybrid work arrangements are more multifaceted across different regions and industries. The tech industry may have been the first to adapt to remote working during the pandemic, but paradoxically it is also the first one to end it. Some countries are still witnessing a further surge after the pandemic, while others are cutting back way faster. Nowhere is this diversity of hybrid models more evident than the European market, as shown by the following and fascinating EUROSTAT map.

The discrepancies among the countries are actually shocking: according to the research, the Netherlands is leading the way with a whopping 51.9% adoption rate of remote work, while countries like Bulgaria are lagging behind with a measly 2.8%. Analysts suggest that the adoption of remote work is influenced by various factors, including the degree of tertiarisation and digitalisation within a country’s economy - as well as cultural differences that affect management, a topic Uncensored readers may already be familiar with.

But even within the diversity of industries and adoption rates, the EU has on average seen an eight percentage point increase since 2019, before the dawn of the pandemic, underscoring a clear trend towards flexible working arrangements.

🚪A cheap way to cut staff?

There is also another hot take that’s been gaining significant traction since the announcement. Amazon’s push for RTO isn’t just about culture or efficiency: some see it as a rather insidious way to trim the workforce. Think about it— it is impossible that Amazon isn’t cognizant of the popularity of hybrid work arrangements. Some employees won’t want to relocate or come back full-time, while others are already applying to its competitors, which could lead to natural attrition. 

And it’s not just a speculative scenario. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, has been transparent about the company's goal to reduce the number of managers by at least 15% by 2025. In other words, this could be a strategic headcount reduction under the guise of a return-to-office mandate.

🔮RTO vs. Hybrid: the labour market as a crystal ball

It is generally a bad idea to look at company policies as crystal balls to predict the future of hybrid work. But at the end of the day, if one is looking for a harbinger of change, the real determining factor behind the future of hybrid work isn’t a single company or policy—it’s the labour market. 

It is no secret that the tech sector has been going through several rounds of layoffs. When jobs aren’t as abundant, employee demands for flexibility (or any demand really) tend to lose leverage and are quicker to disappear. In other sectors, such as manufacturing, the labour market is still pretty tight and workers maintain a strong hold of their leverages—Boeing workers, for example, felt confident enough to strike at the end of last month.

If there’s a recession (which some experts think is on the horizon), we could see a lot more RTO mandates in different industries as companies feel emboldened to impose stricter office policies. But that doesn’t mean hybrid work is going away, especially given how popular it remains across the board. The frequency of remote work is most likely to ebb and flow depending on how competitive the job market is: when it’s strong, remote work wins; when it’s weaker, companies reclaim more control.

So no, Amazon isn’t signaling the end of remote work and it will be very tough to find a company’s policy that is a harbinger of total change. If anything, it’s a sign of a shifting balance, where hybrid work remains, but the terms of engagement keep evolving. And that’s the real takeaway: flexibility is still the future, but it’s going to look different depending on who’s holding the cards.