Should the back-to-the-office brigade be branded as dinosaurs?
Amazon’s decision to bring its staff into the office five days a week is exposing divisions in the debate about flexible working this autumn. There’s growing evidence on both sides of the argument
As the days shorten in the northern hemisphere, the pendulum-swing back towards in-office working, which has been evident throughout 2024, is gathering new momentum this autumn.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy should take at least some of the responsibility for this. He has announced that Amazon staff must go back to their desks five days a week from January 2025 – a full-time mandate that turns the clocks back, in Jassy’s own words, to ‘being in the office the way we were before Covid’.
Amazon is not alone is backtracking on the flexibility gains achieved by employees in the years after the global pandemic. It is tightening up its policies in a similar way to Boots, Goldman Sachs and others, even if Andy Jassy’s memo to staff sought to soften the blow by promising everyone their own desk in Amazon’s new working arrangement.
Zoom, which did so much to hasten the hybrid era and allow millions to work from home, is another tech pioneer that has been surprisingly vocal in its championing of the importance of in-office collaboration. It has mandated workers within a 50-mile radius a Zoom office to show up at least two days per week. Zoom chief product officer Smita Hashim pragmatically told the BBC that ‘If our customers use the office, we do too.’
Looking for a new job
What’s not surprising is the brickbats being thrown at the back-to-the-office brigade. According to British work culture expert Bruce Daisley, a former European VP of Twitter, Amazon’s strict new office mandate will create a ‘young, whiter and more male organisation’ – the inference being that back-to-office mandates will inhibit a more diverse workforce.
Bruce Daisley quotes Stanford professor Nick Bloom as predicting that 30 per cent of Amazon staff will quit over the changes. One Amazon middle manager contacted him with these words: ‘Let’s just say most of us are out there looking for a job from tomorrow.’
Professor Carey Cooper, the influential organisational psychologist who invented the term ‘presenteeism’, reserves his scorn not just for Amazon but for all company CEOs determined to demand a return to a pre-pandemic work week. He told The Guardian that these employers were the ‘dinosaurs of our age’. Cooper argued that if you value and trust your people, they are more likely to work better and remain loyal, and less likely to suffer from a stress-related illness.
The new Labour Government in the UK would seem to agree. Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds told The Times that flexible working creates a more productive and loyal workforce. The Government’s upcoming Employment Rights Bill is likely to give workers the right to ‘disconnect’ out of working hours and compress their contracted hours into fewer working days. Already workers have the right to ask for flexible working as soon as they start a new job – this legislation came into effect in April this year.
Back to the office
Despite such policy moves, much of the current mood music around the future of work suggests a direction back towards more in-office attendance. WORKTECH Academy’s latest Trend Report Q3 2024 for members and partners quotes McKinsey’s Jan Mischke as saying that the global average in the hybrid working era is now at 3.5 days per week in the office.
According to a report in The Economist, physical proximity in the workplace can bring big benefits if managed wisely. The effects, based on the results of various academic studies, include greater productivity and attention to detail as well as improved mentoring.
‘The jury remains out on how far businesses should push the return to office…’
What are we to make if it all? In the debate over dinosaurs and diversity, clearly the jury remains out on how far businesses should push the return to office. At one end of the spectrum, we have workplace experts pointing out the dangers of withdrawing flexibility from the workforce and governments legislating to enshrine the right to work at least partly from home. At the other end, we have muscular CEOs like Amazon’s Andy Jassy dictating a full-time return to the office in a move likely to embolden other large organisations.
One thing is certain. As we head towards the fifth anniversary of the global pandemic, finding a consensus on hybrid working is as far away as ever.
