Amazon's 5-day office push may be the beginning of the end for remote working

• Amazon is asking all office-based staff to go to the office five days a week from January.
• One expert says the move could negatively affect morale, engagement, and employee work-life balance.

Amazon is waving goodbye to remote work.

Starting in January, corporate employees must go into the office five days a week.

Workers were previously told to come in at least three days a week, but Amazon seems eager to end pandemic-era habits.

In a memo sent to staff on Monday, CEO Andy Jassy said: "Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward."

The memo outlined extenuating circumstances such as illness, a household emergency, and the need to finish coding in a more isolated environment as scenarios when remote work may be permitted.

Jassy added that Amazon will bring back assigned desks in offices that used to have them, including its two headquarters in Washington state and Arlington, Virginia, which together have about 88,000 employees.

Negative impact

"We have seen that when people are mandated to attend work, they will resist if they can," Gemma Dale, a senior lecturer in Liverpool John Moores University's business school, told Business Insider.

"I would expect that there is a real potential some employees will look for other opportunities," she said.

Dale suspected that even for those who stay, there could be a negative impact on morale, engagement, and employee work-life balance.

"Savvy employers in the same space might well see this as a talent acquisition opportunity," she said. "If I were hiring for the same skills, I would now be asking my recruitment team to start making proactive contact with potentially disgruntled employees who don't want to return to the office."

Amanda Jones, senior lecturer in organizational behavior and human resource management at King's College London, suggests that it could partially be a case of self-selection.

"It might be that Amazon wants people with particular characteristics," she said, adding that it could encourage some staff to find jobs they're better suited to.

Other companies may follow suit

Jones said that although the five-day RTO push may backfire, if it does work, other organizations could equally decide to adopt it.

"Successful organizations tend to lead the way, and then other organizations tend to emulate those organizations," she said, adding this is especially the case when the mandate is made by a market leader, such as Amazon.

Jones, however, does not believe this new requirement will spell the end of remote work.

"I would be willing to bed that a lot of the people that they're saying need to be working side-by-side probably actually spend a lot of time working online anyway," she said.

In the context of globalization, she said, Amazon employees will still be working remotely with each other because they're based in different locations.

Mandates aren't effective

For Nahla Khaddage Bou-Diab, chairman and general manager of Oneness Mgmt and CEO of AM Bank, large companies need to create a culture that invites people back into the workplace. Force is not going to achieve this sense of belonging in the office for staff, she said.

Amazon should be prioritizing sharing purposes and values between staff and the wider business, she said.

"If one of the big organizations does this then they present a tremendous opportunity for the global environment because others else will follow," Khaddage Bou-Diab told Business Insider.

Whereas if they don't, she said it's likely that other companies will follow suit in Amazon's efforts to bring employees back to the office. "It's like putting a Band-Aid on a wound that's not going to heal anytime soon."

Amazon pointed to Jassy's memo to staff in response to a request for comment from BI.