On January 2, Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees will have to return to the office five days a week instead of working a hybrid schedule. After the announcement, employees speculated that the mandate was a way to get them to quit without formal layoffs, but Amazon CEO Andy Jassy reassured employees at an all-hands meeting Tuesday that this was not Amazon’s way of secretly forcing them to quit.
In a leaked transcript seen by Reuters, Jassy states that the move to completely in-person work was to strengthen culture, not cut costs.
“A number of people I’ve seen theorized that the reason we were doing this is, it’s a backdoor layoff, or we made some sort of deal with city or cities,” said Jassy, according to Reuters. “I can tell you both of those are not true. You know, this was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.”
He added later that returning to the office was “an adjustment” but said, “We’re going to be working through that adjustment together.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Photographer: David Ryder/Bloomberg via Getty Images
A July survey showed that about one in four C-suite leaders hoped strict return-to-office mandates would force employees to quit. Uncompromising return-to-office policies were sometimes layoffs in disguise, the study found.
At Amazon, 91% of 2,500 employees surveyed in September said they were “dissatisfied” with the return-to-office policy and 73% indicated they were already thinking about looking for other jobs.
Returning to the office has persisted as a point of contention at Amazon over the past few months. In October, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said in a leaked meeting that there were “other companies around” for Amazon employees who didn’t like the return-to-office policy,
523 Amazon employees sent a letter to Garman last week protesting his remarks. These workers “have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work, but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience,” the letter reads.
Related: Hybrid Workers Were Put to the Test Against Fully In-Office Employees — Here’s Who Came Out On Top
One data point in support of hybrid work over fully in-person work is a study published in the scientific journal Nature in June. The study randomly divided 1,612 employees of travel company Trip.com into two random groups: One group worked fully in person and the other worked two days per week from home and three days per week in the office in a hybrid schedule.
The findings showed that quit rates dropped by one-third and job satisfaction increased in the hybrid group.
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