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Tag: RTO

  • Amazon’s Return To Office Chickens Come Home To Roost

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    If your week began like mine, Monday morning was a parade of broken web pages and non-working apps. The root of the problem was that Amazon’s AWS premier region had barfed all over itself, and took a lot of the internet down with it.

    This was coming. 

    I called it a year ago, when Amazon started hard-line mandating a return-to-office. I connected the dots then, and now the picture is starting to become clear – a picture of a server farm in flames.

    Look. I’m totally speculating here, but I’m no longer alone in my speculation. And Amazon wasn’t alone in making the mistake of allegedly using a return to office mandate as the most blunt kind of employee weeding-out mechanism. A ton of companies did the same thing. A ton of companies are now paying the price for it.

    However, there’s no more painful example of that payback than when your company takes down a ton of other people’s businesses – then finds itself frozen in place for far too long before being able to determine cause and correction, because no one in the room could figure it out. 

    Again, I’m only connecting dots, not taking a victory lap. 

    Although I think I could take that victory lap. Because it’s becoming clear exactly why something like this was going to happen. And it’s clear that it’s going to happen again. 

    OK, it’s a victory lap, but I also have a fix.

    Amazon’s Big RTO Mistake

    A little over a year ago, I wrote about Amazon kicking off a much more hardline wave of return to office mandates. In that article, I pointed to five reasons why their love-it-or-leave-us approach was a major mistake:

    1. Even before Amazon’s RTO announcement, their competitors’ recruiters were already using said forthcoming announcement to cherry pick Amazon’s most experienced talent.
    2. Amazon would effectively shrink their pool for recruiting new talent by up to 90 percent. This means the more senior talent available outside of Amazon’s geography were more likely to land somewhere else than relocate.
    3. The morale hit that their workforce would take would impact their most senior talent the hardest, and those are the folks with the option to repair their morale by going somewhere else.
    4. The productivity hit they would take by adding commutes and removing focus time would also impact their most senior people the hardest, as their time was logically the most valuable to the company.
    5. The excuses spun up to cover the more obvious reason for RTO – Amazon’s sunk investments in additional corporate HQs – would be most apparent to those folks who had been at Amazon when those HQ investments were made. 

    You don’t have to be a distinguished engineer to see the common thread here. If a company like Amazon wants to smack its most senior and experienced resources in the back of the head five times, their 2024 RTO mandate was the most efficient way to do it.

    The Tech Industry Is Leaking Senior Experience

    It’s not just Amazon. And it’s not necessarily just an RTO mandate that will push experienced talent out the door. It’s actually the use of RTO mandates without exception, which could easily be interpreted as a “shoot first and separate later” way to trim an overhired workforce, that turns an RTO mandate into a self-inflicted wound.

    It happened the same way with overarching AI adoption mandates, cut-at-all-costs calls for profitability, blanket adoption of tired product development practices – basically it seemed like every trendy corporate organizational move since 2022 was invoked to treat all talent as equal and equally expendable. 

    I came up through the industry as a developer. One thing I learned very early on in my corporate executive journey is that if you don’t treat more talented resources with the respect their talent demands, you’ll be left with the talent you deserve. 

    That statement irritates a lot of modern non-tech corporate executives to no end, until they discover that all their experienced employees got tired of their flat-org-for-thee-but-not-for-me bullshit, and they realize they fired all their junior employees to make room for AI productivity theater. 

    Now these executive leaders are left with managers who follow outdated methodologies, leading shell-shocked junior employees who are just fighting to stay on payroll, because without the job, they can’t afford to live where the company HQ is.

    Did this happen to Amazon? I don’t know. But the Register seems to think it’s a possibility.

    A Strong Case for AWS Brain Drain as the Root Cause

    As I was searching for why the hell it took so long for AWS to fix the glitch, I found this column from the Register’s Corey Quinn, a “Chief Cloud Economist” no less, who took a stab at connecting even more dots. DNS dots.

    “And so, a quiet suspicion starts to circulate: where have the senior AWS engineers who’ve been to this dance before gone? And the answer increasingly is that they’ve left the building — taking decades of hard-won institutional knowledge about how AWS’s systems work at scale right along with them.”

    It took 75 minutes, which might as well be 75 days in low-level back end time, just to get to what was going on. Corey speculates why:

    “When that tribal knowledge [experience with ‘wonky’ DNS issues] departs, you’re left having to reinvent an awful lot of in-house expertise that didn’t want to participate in your RTO games, or play Layoff Roulette yet again this cycle. This doesn’t impact your service reliability — until one day it very much does, in spectacular fashion. I suspect that day is today.”

    Gangster.

    Then, knowing the punches are coming, Corey pre-emptively lists “27,000+ Amazonians impacted by layoffs between 2022 and 2024, continuing into 2025,” and Amazon suffering “from 69 percent to 81 percent regretted attrition” and “anecdata of senior Amazonians lamenting the hamfisted approach of their Return to Office initiative.”

    He calls it a tipping point. I love a good tipping point. But I think this is just the first domino to fall. Because…

    Brain Drain Caused the Problem, But Cost Cutting Made It Worse

    My websites stayed up. My apps continued to work.

    For me, the damage was limited to websites and platforms that I use as an extension of what I do, not my primary business. And every time I got stopped out of doing what I do, reading error messages coming unfiltered directly from AWS, the only thing I could think of was:

    “Where is your failover?”

    In other words, why were these websites and app platforms unprepared for their lifeblood provider – hosting and processing – to go down in flames? 

    But my question was hypothetical. I didn’t need an answer because I happen to know something about almost all the companies who provide the platforms that help me do what I do. And I can again speculate, comfortably, that every single one of them cut their costs to the bone, including cutting their own experienced talent.

    Which made this quote from Corey hit home: “I want to be very clear on one last point. This isn’t about the technology being old. It’s about the people maintaining it being new. If I had to guess what happens next, the market will forgive AWS this time, but the pattern will continue.”

    This is exactly what I said a year ago. The pattern continues. And it will continue to get more painful until we bring experience back to the table and give it the respect it deserves.

    Please join the rebel alliance of over 10K tech professionals on my email list. Some of us are old like Kenobi, others are young like Rey, but we all kind of hated “Rise”

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

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    Joe Procopio

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  • The Microshifting Trend Can Engage Your Employees and Boost Productivity—If You Set the Right Boundaries

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    Many studies already say that one of the most powerful incentives you can offer your staff in today’s stressful, competitive workplaces is meaningful perks — with flexible working hours or hybrid and remote work models high on the list. Gen-Z, in particular, is enamoured with workplace philosophies that let them achieve better work-life balance. So it’s odd that one new flexible working trend, “microshifting,” has gotten mixed reviews, with experts suggesting it can result in an undefined and thus perhaps more stressful workday, or embolden managers to contact staff outside of traditional office hours. A new report, however, highlights some benefits of this trend, and advises managers on how to make it work for everyone.

    Microshifting is one of those buzzy new business jargon terms, and it sounds a lot like a new label for a long-established worker methodology: work hardest when it’s best for you and your energy levels, rather than slogging away slowly but steadily for eight hours. News site Indy100, reporting on the phenomenon, simplifies this to managers encouraging “workers to tackle tasks in short bursts, whenever and wherever possible” instead of waiting for the perfect time. With modern work schedules punctuated by frequent Zoom calls, staff meetings, group Slack debates and so on, time spent in the 21st-century office passes in interrupted lumps — so microshifting seems like a great fit for maximizing productivity when you’re trying to tackle meaningful tasks.

    Peter Duris, CEO and co-founder of small AI-centric career assistant service Kickresume spoke to Indy100 on the topic, defending the idea of microshifting as a “great way for employees to balance their personal responsibilities alongside work.” 

    For workers trying to persuade their managers about the benefits of this working style, Duris suggests the best way to gain approval is to “Let your manager and team know when you’ll be available so everyone can plan around your schedule. Using a shared calendar to log your working hours and breaks can help keep things running smoothly.” This may tackle impressions that you’re slacking off or are simply unavailable when a colleague “needs you,” when in fact what you’ve done is compress several hours of normally interrupted work into one continuous burst. To maximize your own microshift efficiency, Duris also recommends working out when you feel most energetic, and then “complete your high-priority tasks during your most productive hours.”

    From a managerial point of view, if your workers seek to microshift and tackle job tasks outside normal working hours or on a radically different schedule, it’s still important to “schedule core working hours for the whole team,” according to Duris because you can then arrange to have meetings and collaborative working sessions in this window. Check-ins on a regular basis are also important because some people end up overworking, possibly raising the risk of burnout — an irony for a working model that is said to be better for work-life balance. 

    Microshifting also doesn’t need to be a remote working habit, or rely on out-of-office hours. It can also happen in the office during regular work periods. It’s just a question of allowing your staff to choose how and when they’re available for team-centric activities, and which hours are most compatible with intense work bursts for their individual needs.

    So, what’s the big takeaway from this for your company?

    The idea of microshifting is a dramatic contrast to the way numerous companies are now pushing for workers to return to the office, allegedly for (possibly misguided) improvements to teamwork and productivity. Microshifting implies a high level of trust from management to workers, enabling higher staff autonomy, which make people feel valued at their jobs and keen to engage and deliver more when tackling work tasks. Critics of RTO rules may point out that it implies low levels of managerial trust in the workforce.

    But microshifting also runs counter to trends like “task masking,” something said to be a typical Gen-Z trick: essentially it means staff are working very hard to look like they’re working very hard, when in actuality they have little work to do at certain moments. Task masking is part of the evolving conversation about traditional workplace culture expectations—and it’s driven by anxiety that if a worker doesn’t appear to be slaving away, they may be targeted by management for downsizing or performance improvement processes. Again, this centers around trust: if your managers trust you to microshift, they won’t be critical when they see you in a low-work moment.

    If your workers are keen to try out alternative working habits, it’s worth bearing much of this in mind, and having meaningful discussions about boundaries, trust levels and productivity expectations.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Is RTO Hurting Your Employee Morale? Manager Burnout Could Be to Blame

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    Return to office (RTO) mandates aren’t popular, as report after report shows. Whether they are announced in a my way or the highway style, like Amazon’s Andy Jassy or JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon, or with less bluster. Some research shows RTOs are not effective tools for boosting productivity, and that plenty of workers are finding ways to skirt the policy.

    Now a new report suggests that the gap between RTO mandates and employee compliance remains because many managers may be so burnt out that they’re completely uninterested in forcing their staff to follow controversial and deeply unpopular company rules. It could be that over-stressed managers are driving this so-called “hushed hybrid” office culture, Fortune suggests.

    Support for this conclusion comes from a survey by Flex Index, which describes itself as a platform for analyzing flexible workplace habits. Among 14,000 companies it looked at, increasing numbers of RTO mandates drove required in-office time up by 12 percent since early 2024, meaning staff have gone from an average expected office attendance rate of 2.57 days a week to 2.87. That may sound modest, but remember this includes companies that remain fully remote. Regardless of what the RTO rules say, actual attendance has not risen at the same rate. Over the same period while in-office time expectations rose 12 percent, actual attendance only rose by 1 percentage point, to 3 percent.

    Brian Elliott, CEO of Work Forward, which publishes the Flex Index, told Fortune that some workers can get away with ignoring leadership demands that they spend more time in the office in person with practical arguments supporting more flexible arrangements. For example, managing online meetings with multiple staff members across multiple time zones remains challenging in any setting — so staying at home on a day like that wouldn’t make a difference to productivity.

    And, given high levels of management burnout and disengagement, employees may be more likely to get away with this sort of trick more often than you may expect. “If I’m the manager and I’ve got a solid performer and they’re coming in two or three days a week, but not five, I’m not going to fire them,” Elliott said. That’s because as long as someone is “delivering the goods and getting their work done,” managers who are under severe pressure themselves may simply decide that compliance with certain policies is lower on the list of priorities.

    Anecdotally, Elliott’s thinking makes sense: reports show that executive burnout remains a serious issue in U.S. workplaces, with a survey in March reporting some 72 percent of workplace leaders report feeling burned out. Given the trend toward flatter business structures with fewer middle managers, led by big tech firms like Meta and Microsoft, it’s entirely plausible that stressed-out middle managers, overburdened with work and worried about the threat technology like AI represents to their own jobs, would simply ignore the exact amount of time that key workers spend in the office, even if it violates RTO rules that have been sent down from upper management.

    Why should you care about this?

    It’s another signal that RTO rules sometimes just don’t make good business sense. If you expect your managers to enforce an unpopular new rule, you might be adding to their already high stress levels while also genereating resentment from the employees that report to them. That’s a recipe for increasing the chance your strict RTO policy might simply be ignored by the people who are supposed to enforce it.

    If your company is requiring people to spend more time in the office, then perhaps the way to make your policy work is with encouragement and perks: Flex Index’s data show that if you try stamping your foot, you might just end up being ignored, and, possibly, hurting your workforce’s perception of your leadership.

    Also, there’s an underlying data point here: managers may be burning out under your leadership, and it’s possible you may not have noticed. It might be time for a pep talk, and honest chats about work burdens and stresses. 

    The final deadline for the 2025 Inc. Best in Business Awards is Friday, September 12, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

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    Kit Eaton

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  • Amazon CEO Mandates Employees Return to Office 5 Days a Week | Entrepreneur

    Amazon CEO Mandates Employees Return to Office 5 Days a Week | Entrepreneur

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    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy made a case — and a mandate — for in-office work on Monday.

    In a publicly available message, Jassy said that Amazon’s 1.5 million-plus employees must return to the office five days per week starting January 2. Amazon is also bringing back desk assignments to the offices that had that structure pre-pandemic.

    Jassy positioned the move as a better way to work and a return to life before Covid.

    “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy stated.

    Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

    Jassy also said that situations that require remote work like sickness, an emergency, or being on the road are still acceptable.

    However, these examples of remote work are the exception to the new rule, not the norm.

    Related: Here’s How Much Money U.S. Employees Will Sacrifice to Avoid Returning to the Office, According to a New Study

    Amazon employees have been back in the office at least three days per week as of February 2023. A July report from Bamboo HR showed that one in four executives secretly hoped employees would quit over stricter return-to-office policies.

    “Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for the s-team [senior leadership team] and me. And, I think about it all the time,” he wrote. “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup.”

    Under the new policy, working from home two days per week is no more. The office culture is returning to how it was before the pandemic, to strengthen work culture and drive better results, Jassy explained.

    Related: Dell Reportedly Told Remote Employees to Come Back to the Office or Forgo the Chance to Be Promoted

    Amazon joins companies like Salesforce and Walmart that have implemented stricter return-to-work policies.

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    Sherin Shibu

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  • Labor Day is just a ‘milestone’ in the marathon to get workers back to the office

    Labor Day is just a ‘milestone’ in the marathon to get workers back to the office

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    The U.S. Labor Day holiday will mark another milestone in the marathon to bring workers back to the office, but it won’t be a quick fix for landlords, according to Thomas LaSalvia, head of commercial real estate economics at Moody’s Analytics.

    Employers from Facebook parent Meta
    META,
    +0.27%
    to Goldman Sachs
    GS,
    -0.26%
    recently laid out mandates for staff to return to the office more frequently, starting this fall, including the big one — the federal government.

    “A lot of companies are saying that after Labor Day, ‘We expect more out of you,” LaSalvia said, referring to days in the office. Still, office attendance, he argues, likely only stages a fuller comeback if a job or promotion is on the line.

    Amazon.com Inc.’s
    AMZN,
    +2.18%
    Chief Executive Andy Jassy has been trying to drive home the point by warning staff to return at least three days a week, or face the consequences.

    That could prove difficult, with Friday’s U.S. jobs report for August expected to show U.S. unemployment at a scant 3.5%, near the lowest levels since the late 1960s, even if hiring has been slowing. The labor market, so far, appears unfazed by the Federal Reserve’s benchmark rate reaching a 22-year high.

    It has been a different story for landlords facing a roughly 19% vacancy rate nationally and piles of debt coming due, especially for owners of older Class B and C office buildings with a bleak outlook or properties in cities with wobbling business centers.

    See: San Francisco’s office market erases all gains since 2017 as prices sag nationally

    As with shopping malls, LaSalvia said it’s largely a problem of oversupply, with many office properties at risk of becoming obsolete as tenants flock to better buildings and locations staging a rebirth. The trend can be traced in leasing data since 2021, with Class A properties in central business districts (blue line) showing a big advantage over less desirable buildings in the heart of cities (orange line).

    Return to office isn’t going to save the entire office property market


    Moody’s Analytics

    “Little by little, we are finding the office isn’t dead,” LaSalvia said, but he also sees more promise in neighborhoods with a new purpose, those catering to hybrid work and communities that bring people together.

    Another way to look at the trend is through rents. Manhattan’s Penn Station submarket, with its estimated $13 billion overhaul and neighboring Hudson Yards development, has seen asking rents jump 32% to $74.87 a square foot in the second quarter since the fourth quarter of 2019, according to Moody’s Analytics. That compares with a 2% bump in asking rents in downtown New York City to $61.39 a square foot for the same period.

    The push for a return to the office also doesn’t mean a repeat of prepandemic ways. Goldman Sachs analysts estimate that part-time remote work in the U.S. has stabilized around 20%-25%, in a late August report, but that’s still up from 2.6% before the 2020 lockdowns.

    Furthermore, the persistence of remote work will likely add another 171 million square feet of vacant U.S. office space through 2029, a period that also will see tenants’ long-term leases expire and many companies opting for less space. The additional vacancies would roughly translate to 57% of Los Angeles roughly 300 million square feet of office space sitting empty.

    “The fundamental reason why we had offices in the first place have not completely disintegrated,” LaSalvia said. “But for some of those Class B and C offices, the writing was on the wall before the pandemic.”

    U.S. stocks were mixed Thursday, but headed for losses in a tough August for stocks, with the S&P 500 index
    SPX
    off about 1.5% for the month, the Dow Jones Industrial Average
    DJIA
    2.1% lower and the Nasdaq Composite
    COMP
    down 2% in August, according to FactSet.

    Related: Some employers mandate etiquette classes as returning office workers walk barefoot, burp loudly and microwave fish

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  • Return-to-office debates keep lumping together two very different employee types and it’s time to ‘bring in the nuance,’ says a recruiting expert

    Return-to-office debates keep lumping together two very different employee types and it’s time to ‘bring in the nuance,’ says a recruiting expert

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    With CEOs increasingly issuing return-to-office mandates and remote work advocates saying not so fast, managers can be forgiven for feeling confused. 

    Many bosses feel that their younger employees, in order to grow and absorb the company culture, need in-person guidance and a chance to connect with other workers. Meanwhile many senior employees, especially ones with kids, feel that working from home is actually more effective in their case.

    One problem with today’s return-to-office debates is that they often lump these two very different types of employees together, believes Hung Lee, the writer and founder of the Recruiting Brainfood newsletter. 

    “We’ve treated things monolithically, and sometimes we need to make generalizations, of course, in order to have a conversation,” he said in an a16z podcast episode published this week. “But we’re probably at the point now where we need to bring in the nuance because what is positive for one group of people is negative for another.” 

    He pointed to an iCIMS report’s survey showing that, among university seniors entering the workforce, fully remote work held little appeal. Only 2% of them said they wanted such an arrangement. Nearly 60% said they don’t have all the equipment they need at home, and a third said they lack a dedicated workspace. Nearly 90% said they wanted to frequently meet in person with coworkers to build relationships and network.

    If you look at companies that were already successfully remote-first before the pandemic, they tended to avoid such employees and instead focused on senior workers with plenty of experience, Lee noted. Today, “the people who are most pro-remote—the remote evangelists, so to speak—they are all of that demographic,” he said. “They are individual contributors who have established a level of expertise.”

    Such workers have typically already built up social capital and have an effective workspace at home, he noted, and often have children they want to be near: “They don’t feel they need to come to the office in order to make friends.” 

    By contrast, younger workers might live with roommates or their parents or perhaps feel isolated in a small apartment and crave the opportunity to connect face-to-face with colleagues. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, believes remote work has “detonated” the way we connect, with younger workers suffering the most. “You get to sit in your studio apartment in front of your laptop and good luck—you’re cut off from everything else,” he said at a summit last November.

    Return-to-office backlash

    Many companies are settling on a hybrid schedule, with employees asked (or required) to work in the office three or four days a week. It isn’t always going smoothly. Amazon recently saw an employee walkout over its return-to-office mandate, and last month workers at Google let their displeasure be known. 

    “There is a bit of a tension at this point where some companies are rolling back the remote policies, or at least they’re starting to put additional conditions upon it, which you can see it’s kind of a mission creep back to the office,” said Lee. 

    He believes that power is swinging back toward employers, who are seeing “an opportunity to claw back some of what they may have always perceived to be an overly permissive position when it comes down to working remote.”

    Either way, when “building a company or designing an organization,” employee demographics have to be kept in mind, Lee says. “If we are absolutely a remote-first company, we are probably optimized as an employer for a senior individual contributor that has already achieved a certain degree of material comfort.” 

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    Steve Mollman

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