Why moves by Amazon and comments by Jamie Dimon don’t threaten an end to remote work benefits

(CNN) — If your employer lets you work remotely one or more days a week, and you highly value that kind of flexibility, you probably didn’t love hearing last week that Amazon will soon require its corporate employees to return to the office five days a week.

Or when AT&T last year announced it was consolidating offices and requiring managers to work on site at least three days a week — which meant some managers who lived near an office that was closing had to relocate or quit.

Or even when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, most of whose employees are already working in the office five days, publicly expressed displeasure last week that more government employees weren’t working on site in federal buildings, which he described as “empty,” according to various news reports.

Whenever a big player publicly cracks the whip on requiring employees to be in the office full time, the worry is that other employers will follow suit.

But for two key reasons, these kinds of public proclamations don’t signal a broader demise of remote work benefits.

1. A stringent RTO mandate may signal a cheap way for the employer to cut staff

In the case of Amazon, CEO Andy Jassy’s memo announcing his new RTO mandate said all the usual things about wanting to strengthen in-person collaboration and company culture.

But, importantly, Jassy also highlighted his desire to reduce the glut of managers hired in recent years, which had created more “layers,” including “a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward,” he said. To thin the managerial herd, Jassy called on senior leaders in the company “to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.”

Normally that might involve manager layoffs.

But by imposing an unpopular mandate to be in the office five days a week, “middle managers who have been made wealthy enough will say ‘I’m leaving,’” said Chris Williams, a former vice president of human resources at Microsoft who is now a leadership consultant to C-suite executives.

That saves the company the expense of having to provide severance packages, because people will leave voluntarily.

Jassy’s risk is that too many managers will quit. “He will solve his near-term problem. But he will have a hard time convincing new hires to commute to downtown Seattle five days a week. So he may have a going-forward recruiting problem,” Williams said.

If so, that may require Amazon to eventually — and quietly — back off enforcing the new five-days-a-week mandate to attract talent, he suggested.

2. Flex work options are too popular to ditch

While an individual company may decide to backtrack on its remote work policies, the numbers suggest that’s not happening widely.

Workplace consulting firm Gallup found in May that among full-time employees in remote-capable jobs, 53% work a hybrid schedule, 27% work exclusively remotely and 21% work on site. Those are roughly the same percentages reported in November 2022.

As of August 31, job postings on Indeed.com that specify hybrid and remote work have dipped a half percentage point year over year. But that’s primarily because industries that typically have the most remote-capable jobs (e.g., software development) have been hiring less of late, according to Nick Bunker, Indeed’s North American economic research director.

A Conference Board survey of US workers, meanwhile, found that workplace flexibility is the most important element of total compensation beyond a competitive salary. It also found that HR leaders say hybrid work models help attract and retain talent.

So it’s not surprising that Gallup also found that 64% of those working fully remote and 29% who work hybrid said they would be “extremely likely” to look for another job “if your employer decides not to offer opportunities for you to work remote some or all of the time long term.”

Many CEOs seem to have gotten the memo. The Conference Board in January reported that just 4% of US CEOs said they planned to prioritize bringing people back to the office full time.

Williams noted: “I have yet to talk to any enlightened CEO who honestly believes the only way to make a good [workplace] culture is face-to-face.”

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