Amazon’s return-to-office policy announced in September, mandating employees work in person five days a week starting in 2025, has workers irritated. Some have even begun “rage-applying” to new positions, wanting to stick it to the tech company. The trouble for them: that could be exactly the response Amazon was hoping for.
The tech mammoth’s strict RTO push might just be a sneaky means of laying off workers, some future-of-work experts say. Amazon likely already knows the new policy will nudge dissatisfied workers out, meaning the company will no longer have to go through the tough process of formal layoffs. As a tradeoff, the RTO crusade could come at the expense of the company’s own talent and tech advancements.
“Amazon presumably took the view they would rather control costs by cutting head count and take the hit of technology and innovation,” Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom told Business Insider.
The company may be content with making the sacrifice of some brain drain. The RTO crackdown came in tandem with CEO Andy Jassy calling for a reduction in managers and a bump in the ratio of workers to managers by 15% by the end of 2025’s first quarter. Amazon said its RTO shift is an effort to strengthen company culture and that the company has no plans to reduce its headcount.
Brian Elliott, future-of-work advisor and author of How the Future Works: Leading Flexible Teams to Do the Best Work of Their Lives, agreed with Bloom. He told Fortune Amazon will “undoubtedly” see employee attrition as a result of the mandate because it continues to be widely unpopular among most U.S. workers.
“The vast majority of people want something that is in the middle: They want a couple days a week together that are meaningful with their teams,” he said. “And, by the way, those people the flexibility is taken away from are much more likely to jump ship.”
A study from human resources consulting firm Robert Half conducted last month revealed 39% of office workers in Australia would quit if their company slashed flexible working. Amazon employees are already bolstering that statistic. Anonymous job review site Blind, which surveyed 2,585 verified Amazon workers a day after Jassy’s RTO announcement, found that 73% of employees considered quitting their jobs as a result of the mandate.
Amazon’s high risk strategy
These “backdoor layoffs,” as Bloom refers to them, have already made a splash in other workplaces. According to research by BambooHR published in May surveying over 1,500 U.S. managers, about a quarter of executives said they hoped employees would voluntarily leave the company after the implementation of an RTO mandate. When AT&T mandated its 60,000 workers across nine of its 350 offices work in person again, some employees interpreted the push as a way to eliminate workers unable or uninterested in relocating 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 layoff wolf in return-to-office sheep’s clothing,” an anonymous AT&T employee told Bloomberg.
The sneaky layoff strategy hasn’t always worked out for employers. Almost half of employers that implemented RTO policies saw a greater than anticipated level of employee attrition, according to a 2023 report from Unispace. Almost 30% reported recruitment difficulties.
Amazon will face this same risk, Elliott argued. Other tech companies may keep their flexible work policies as a means to poach Amazon’s talent, and Amazon may struggle to hire new faces, he said. This talent pool shrinks even more for women, who may need flexibility for child care, and managers, who can leverage experience to find a cushier job elsewhere.
“You lose a set of people in your organization,” Elliott said. “You lose high performance.”
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on October 2, 2024.