“My morale for this job is gone, gonna totally check out,” an Amazon worker recently wrote on Blind, an online forum where employees whinge about their employers. The cause of his discontent was a letter sent last month by Andy Jassy, the tech giant’s boss, that ordered staff back to the office five days a week. The mandate has caused grumbling among Amazon’s office drones, who had previously been required to show up in person only three days a week. At a meeting on October 17th Matt Garman, head of Amazon’s cloud-computing division, told a group of staff that if they did not want to adhere to the policy they could quit.
Amazon is not the only big company that has clamped down on remote work. Goldman Sachs, a bank, PwC, a professional-services group, and Stellantis, a carmaker, are among those that have increased the number of days they require their employees to come into the office. More are set to follow. A recent global survey by KPMG, another professional-services firm, found that four-fifths of company bosses expect a return to the office five days a week within three years.
Such mandates may already be starting to show up in aggregate figures. Every month WFH Research, a group of academics, asks American workers how many days they were able to work from home in the past week. In September around 28% of working days were at home, down about two percentage points from the year before. The change in some industries is more dramatic: the portion of employees in tech, financial and professional-services firms who work at least some of the time from home has fallen by an average of ten percentage points.
Mandating a return to the office tends to irritate staff. A survey by Gartner, a research firm, found that a third of executives and a fifth of other employees would leave their jobs if they were forced back to the office. For some companies, that may be the point. Many tech firms and consultancies hired too many workers during the covid-19 pandemic boom. Getting some of them to leave voluntarily would reduce severance costs—though it also risks pushing talented employees to join rivals.
The more likely explanation is that many bosses believe having employees in the office leads to better performance. Plenty of studies now suggest that remote employees are less productive. One paper that looked at data-entry workers in India found that those consistently working from home were 18% less productive than those consistently in the office.
There is less evidence, though, that letting staff work from home a couple of days a week in a hybrid arrangement has a negative effect on performance. A randomised control trial at a Chinese online travel agency by Nick Bloom of Stanford University and two other researchers found no discernible difference in performance between hybrid workers and those who toiled entirely from the office.
Bosses may quibble that a call centre is not representative of the work many of their staff perform. More complex tasks, such as advising a client on how to structure a merger or designing a user interface, can require a lot of collaboration that may be difficult to achieve virtually. Junior employees may also receive less coaching if they interact with others only through scheduled Zoom calls.
Some bosses also fret that hybrid work will erode their company’s culture, as new employees don’t absorb it and old ones forget it. In his letter, Mr Jassy wrote that Amazon’s culture “has been one of the most critical parts of our success” and that “it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practise, and strengthen” it when working together in the office.
For now, investors seem to be withholding judgment. A study published in April by Sean Flynn of Cornell University and two co-authors looked at 600 or so listed American firms that had published remote-work policies. The authors found that variation in the stringency of these had no significant effect on the performance of the firms’ shares relative to those of their peers. If Mr Jassy is right, that may soon change. ■
