Amazon Mandates 5-Days-a-Week RTO, Others to Follow
A few weeks ago Amazon changed the game in remote work. It announced that, effective 1 Jan 2025, all workers would have to report to the office 5 days a week. It's a major change from the company's previous 3-day-a-week RTO policy. Employees are unsurprisingly unhappy about it. Various surveys show they gave it a satisfaction rating of 1.3 on a 1-5 scale (1 being the lowest) and that 73% are considering quitting to work elsewhere.
Elsewhere may be a dwindling choice, though. When a major company with enormous cachet like Amazon makes a move like this, others will follow- others not just in the technology industry but across all industries. Indeed, Dell made a similar change for at least some of its employees already. After a 3-day-a-week policy announced months ago, Dell upped it to 5 days a week for its sales staff two weeks after Amazon's announcement.
Some leaders couch this change in terms of "Back to normal", like they're simply undoing the unique adaptions we were all forced to make during the urgent conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic didn't create remote work; it merely increased the number of people who performed it. 5-day-a-week RTO is not just going back to how things were in 2019, it's actually a regression back many, many years.
Elsewhere may be a dwindling choice, though. When a major company with enormous cachet like Amazon makes a move like this, others will follow- others not just in the technology industry but across all industries. Indeed, Dell made a similar change for at least some of its employees already. After a 3-day-a-week policy announced months ago, Dell upped it to 5 days a week for its sales staff two weeks after Amazon's announcement.
Some leaders couch this change in terms of "Back to normal", like they're simply undoing the unique adaptions we were all forced to make during the urgent conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic didn't create remote work; it merely increased the number of people who performed it. 5-day-a-week RTO is not just going back to how things were in 2019, it's actually a regression back many, many years.