Using RTO to push quitting could result in an “array of legal consequences.”
Palo Alto, CA, USA – Feb 18, 2020: The Amazon logo seen at Amazon campus in Palo Alto, California. Credit: Getty
Amazon workers are being reminded that they can find work elsewhere if they’re unhappy with Amazon’s return-to-office (RTO) mandate.
In September, Amazon told staff that they’ll have to RTO five days a week starting in 2025. Amazon employees are currently allowed to work remotely twice a week. A memo from CEO Andy Jassy announcing the policy change said that “it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” when working at the office.
On Thursday, at what Reuters described as an “all-hands meeting” for Amazon Web Services (AWS), AWS CEO Matt Garman reportedly told workers:
If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around.
Garman said that he didn’t “mean that in a bad way,” however, adding: “We want to be in an environment where we’re working together. When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in-person.”
Interestingly, Garman’s comments about dissatisfaction with the RTO policy coincided with him claiming that 9 out of 10 Amazon employees that he spoke to are in support of the RTO mandate, Reuters reported.
Some suspect RTO mandates are attempts to make workers quit
Amazon has faced resistance to RTO since pandemic restrictions were lifted. Like workers at other companies, some Amazon employees have publicly wondered if strict in-office policies are being enacted as attempts to reduce headcount without layoffs.
In July 2023, Amazon started requiring employees to work in their team’s central hub location (as opposed to remotely or in an office that may be closer to where they reside). Amazon reportedly told workers that if they didn’t comply or find a new job internally, they’d be considered a “voluntary resignation,” per a Slack message that Business Insider reportedly viewed. And many Amazon employees have already reported considering looking for a new job due to the impending RTO requirements.
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However, employers like Amazon “can face an array of legal consequences for encouraging workers to quit via their RTO policies,” Helen D. (Heidi) Reavis, managing partner at Reavis Page Jump LLP, an employment, dispute resolution, and media law firm, told Ars Technica:
If those impacted are disproportionately in a protected group—such as women with children or disabled persons—the employers could face class or other group actions. Are the RTO policies open to attack based on the argument that they are merely a pretext for eliminating workers in certain groups and not truly justified by business needs?
Reavis also pointed to the potential for employees to make breach of contract or breach of implied contract claims, depending on their work contracts, and emphasized the importance of RTO mandates aligning with employment policies and handbooks.
Amazon likely to lose workers whether it wants to or not
After announcing the RTO changes for 2025, a survey of 2,585 Amazon employees from Blind, an online anonymous community discussing work culture, found that 73 percent of participants were “considering looking for another job” because of the mandate. Thirty-two percent reported knowing someone who already quit because of the policy.
Amazon has never publicly stated that it truly wants people to leave the company due to in-office work requirements. However, broader surveys have suggested that at least some companies have done exactly that.
In a BambooHR survey of 1,504 full-time US workers, including 504 in human resources (HR), released in June, 25 percent of participants serving as VPs or C-suite executives and 18 percent of those in HR “hoped for some voluntary turnover during an RTO.”
But using RTO as a deterrent and RTO policies in general put companies at risk of losing valuable employees. Forty-five percent of respondents to BambooHR’s survey who work at companies with RTO policies said that they’ve lost important employees. RTO policies reportedly led to companies like Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX losing senior talent, for example.
Even if Amazon isn’t hoping that its RTO mandate drives away workers, there’s a good chance that it will. In a report from HR platform provider Remote announced today and entitled “2024 Global Workforce Report: why global teams are surging,” about 73 percent of “hiring leaders asked said they had lost employees to other companies that offer more flexibility within the last six months.” That said, 51.2. percent of total respondents “find managing remote teams tricky at times,” with only 22.3 percent saying they “have never run into issues with remote team management.” Further, 31.2 percent of organizations “often struggle to keep their company culture alive among distributed teams, the report says. Remote said it surveyed 4,126 HR leaders across 10 countries, including 513 “decision-makers” in the US, in August for the report.
