OK, fun’s over. Know your place. And that place is here, back in the office, where I can see you. Swipe in. And only swipe out again when I say so.
This, loosely translated, is the message sent to Amazon staff by its chief executive, Andy Jassy, in a memo first released in the middle of September.
“Hey team”, it began. And after some uplifting chat about how well they were all doing, and news about getting rid of more middle managers—you know, the ones who actually know what is going on—Jassy unleashed his thunderbolt: “We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid.” He means five days a week. “Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances… We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements.” Get back to your desks, literally. At least the boss remembered his manners. “Thanks, Andy” was the sign-off.
Maybe Jassy’s favourite karaoke number is Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time”. That seems to be the thrust of what he is arguing. If only we could go back to the way things were before 2020, wouldn’t that be… better? But this is not how many employees feel these days. They have enjoyed the flexibility that remote working has offered them. They have continued to get their work done, just in a more convenient way. They have saved money, energy and time by working at home. And while many would also like to come into the office for some of the time—especially important for younger workers nearer the start of their careers—they don’t necessarily want to be there all the time. As Kamala Harris might put it: “We are not going back.”
Jassy’s gambit is a classic example of a CEO doing what CEOs do. Indeed, a new survey of CEO attitudes from KPMG found that in the UK as many as 83 per cent believe their staff will be back in the office full-time within three years, up from 63 per cent a year ago. Although in every other way Amazon is a famously data-driven company, it seems unlikely that there is hard evidence in favour of this move, or popular demand from the workforce that everybody should be back in full time. Alison Taylor, clinical professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, criticised Amazon’s announcement in forceful terms in a much-read (and shared) LinkedIn post: “Change and uncertainty is accelerating, but we are unable to move on from top-down projections of confidence and knowing what’s best,” she wrote. “This isn’t the leadership we need.”
Gut feel may get you so far as a boss. But it is hardly reliable. “Intuition is a conundrum and a paradox: it’s both powerful and perilous, it can both help and hinder the decision maker and be both friend and foe,” writes Eugene Sadler-Smith, professor of organisational behaviour at Surrey Business School, in his new book The Hubris Hazard, and How to Avoid It. “When that person is a powerful and previously successful leader in an unstable and uncertain situation unbridled intuition can hasten destructive, and sometimes disastrous, outcomes.”
What do bosses become so detached from the concerns of their colleagues? A 30-year study newly published in the American Journal of Sociology may point to some of the reasons. The paper is titled “The Great Separation”, and provides evidence from a dozen countries that highly paid executives are increasingly cut off from their fellow workers.
Top earners are more and more often surrounded by other top earners and are isolated from lower earners, the researchers found. (Technological change and industrial shifts lie behind these developments.) This leads to higher earners being cut off from other workers, their norms and ways of thinking. In turn this can alter how elites engage with the rest of society, and how lower earners see them. The “great separation” may have had an impact on “the key social and political challenges of our time”, the researchers say. This is late capitalism in action.
Good luck to Amazon bosses, clicking their fingers and summoning everyone back in. Some will go along with this and some will not. (One or two formal exceptions to the new diktat have, of course, already emerged.) Sceptics have suggested that this move is in fact a headcount reduction measure in disguise, avoiding costly redundancy packages. The problem for Amazon could be that the labour turnover will be “regretted”—that is, good people will leave, while the ones bosses hoped would leave may stick around.
In the end this mandated Return to the Office is not really about the office at all. It’s about control. But complete control is something most bosses will never have. Who is going to be brave enough to tell them?
