Amazon’s RTO push could be a sneaky way to lay off workers

The tech behemoth’s strict RTO push could just be a sneaky means of laying off workers, some experts on the future of work say. Amazon probably already knows that the new policy will push out disgruntled workers, meaning the company will no longer have to go through the difficult process of formal layoffs. As a trade-off, the RTO crusade could come at the expense of the company’s own talent and technological advances.

“Amazon presumably thought it would rather control costs by cutting staff and take the hit from technology and innovation,” said Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom. Business Insider.

The company might be content to make the sacrifice of a certain brain drain. The RTO crackdown came in tandem with CEO Andy Jassy calling for a reduction in the number of managers and a 15 percent increase in the worker-to-manager ratio by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Amazon said the change The RTO is an effort to strengthen the company’s culture and that the company has no plans to downsize.

Brian Elliott, future of work advisor and author of How the future works: Leading flexible teams to do the best work of their livesagreed with Bloom. he said wealth Amazon will “undoubtedly” see employee attrition as a result of the mandate, as it continues to be widely unpopular with most US workers.

“The vast majority of people want something in the middle: They want a few days a week together that make sense for their teams,” he said. “And by the way, those people whose flexibility is taken away are much more likely to jump ship.”

A study by HR consultancy Robert Half last month found 39 per cent of office workers in Australia would quit if their company cut back on flexible working. Amazon employees already support this statistic. The anonymous job review site Blind, which surveyed 2,585 Amazon workers verified a day after Jassy’s RTO announcement, found that 73 percent of employees considered quitting their jobs as a result of mandate.

Amazon’s high-risk strategy

These “backdoor firings,” as Bloom refers to them, have already made waves in other workplaces. According to research by BambooHR released in May, which surveyed more than 1,500 U.S. managers, about a quarter of executives said they hoped employees would voluntarily leave the company after implementing an RTO mandate. When AT&T mandated its 60,000 workers in nine of its 350 offices to work in person again, some employees interpreted the push as a way to weed out workers who can’t or aren’t interested in moving into their offices. CEO John Stankey estimated that 15 percent of the affected workforce, about 9,000 employees, would face the choice of relocating or leaving the company entirely.

“He’s a fired wolf in sheep’s clothing coming back to the office,” said an anonymous AT&T employee Bloomberg.

The stealth firing strategy hasn’t always worked for employers. Nearly half of employers who implemented RTO policies experienced higher-than-anticipated employee attrition, according to a 2023 report from Unispace. Almost 30% reported recruitment difficulties.

Amazon will face the same risk, Elliott argued. Other tech companies may keep their flexible work policies as a means to poach Amazon’s talent, and Amazon may struggle to hire new faces, he said. This talent pool shrinks further for women, who may need flexibility to care for children, and for managers, who can use experience to find a more comfortable job elsewhere.

“You lose a set of people in your organization,” Elliott said. “You’re missing out on high performance.”