Summary Bullets:

• A survey of 2,585 Amazon staffers conducted by Blind, an anonymous social media platform, reported that 91% are dissatisfied with the new five-day in-office policy.
• Separate Blind research involving employees from multiple companies found 65% are anxious about return to office (RTO) orders.

If there was any upside to the 2020 COVID 19-driven lockdown, the overnight move to remote work granted many corporate employees a new work from home perk. The move eliminated difficult and often costly commutes. Working from home also gave families flexibility to lessen the load in areas like childcare and logistics. But the biggest benefit of working from home might be the gift of time. Many enterprises retained at least hybrid working operations, requiring staff to come in on a limited basis. But now, more than four years after lockdown began, more corporations are calling employees back in the office for the full five days.

Amazon is one of the more recent of these to mandate that employees come back to the office full time. CEO Andy Jassy issued a memo earlier this month ordering employees back to the office five days a week starting in January. Currently staff is only required to be in the office three days a week.

Employee response was quick and, as expected, critical of the plan. A survey of 2,585 Amazon employees conducted by job review site Blind found that 73% are considering quitting the online retail giant because of the RTO order.

There has been some speculation that the mandate may be Amazon’s way of cutting staffing levels without the cost of severance. Whatever the case, Amazon isn’t alone in issuing an RTO order; Dell just announced a similar plan and Google, Meta, and Apple have done the same.

Only time will tell how the future of work will evolve. What is clear is how popular the hybrid and remote work are.