Amazon’s requirement of employees working from the office five days a week does not necessarily market the return of pre-pandemic office requirements. It will depend on a few factors.
Amazon recently announced that starting in January 2025 its employees must be in the office five days a week. Is this the beginning of the end of hybrid work? Will other companies follow suit, or will this be an aberration?
I’m answering this not only as a career and management expert, but also as someone who has run such teams. While my career began 100% in office, I was managing offshore teams starting about twenty years ago. Even ten years ago I had teams where some people were remote or hybrid, typically who had been with the company early and so were grandfathered with flexible understandings. (The hardest part as a manager was dealing with jealousy from other employees.)
In 2017 I joined a fully virtual company as the CTO / CPO. I did establish a small engineering office in NYC. Even then for those in NYC (and not the overseas team), I quickly decided to do just three days in the office. They employees didn’t want to commute every day and for the work we were doing it just didn’t matter if we were together for those extra two days.
When the pandemic began, so did the largest workplace experiment in history. Prior to it, the question from many managers was, “Could this possibly work?” Today we know the answer is yes, and now the question is, “How do we optimize this?”
Five full days in the office means good overlap with co-located coworkers, but at the cost of commute time. Zero days means no commute, the ability to hire anywhere, but with less robust interactions. It’s also limiting for younger workers who need to learn in the presence of others and who want social interactions at the office. Very importantly, managers see remote work benefits and limitations very differently than how individual contributors do (see one of my more popular articles, Why Your Boss Is Less Excited about Remote Work Than You Are).
During my hundreds of interviews and talks the past few years I’ve noted that for remote/hybrid work to become permanent it would need to last roughly three to five years and depend on the economy. After a full five years, this would become the standard (we even see some companies experimenting today with a 4-day work week). If two years in the pandemic would be over, or if the economy was poor in the next few years and people would take jobs regardless of the terms like days-in-office, then it could have been a temporary shift. We’re four years after the start of the pandemic and some-but-not-all days in the office has become pretty common. However, the labor market is softening. If we go into a serious recession in the next year, I think it's not too late for companies to require more days in the office and get it. Personally, I don’t think a full recession is likely and while the labor market will soften it will be short and shallow.
That said, there’s not just “one” labor market. Constructor workers, nurses, and software engineers, for example, are each in their own labor markets. They don’t easily change careers. Marketers, accountants, HR, etc. tend to be more general since if the economy is good more small businesses start and larger ones expand, increasing the need for those general roles.
Amazon is in tech (the warehouse workers obviously already needed to be on-site). It’s also in the top tier of tech. If another FAANG company follows suit, those companies may be able to require five days a week and hold on to it, as there are a limited number of FAANG companies. Even in a strong labor market people may still clamor to get the jobs there. But if the others stay hybrid, and the labor market strengthens in tech, Amazon may find it’s losing the talent war to other large tech companies and may need to adjust. There is some crossover between industries as well. Wall Street relaxed its strict dress code in the late aughts because new college grads wanted more the relaxed Silicon Valley lifestyle and finance needed to be competitive in the labor market.
We can’t know for certain what will happen with the labor market and hybrid work, but we can model out the factors that can impact it. Pay attention to the labor market, especially by industry, and if we start to see a herd mentality towards 100% in-office in certain verticals. My guess is the window for going back to being fully in the office is closing in the year or so, but it’s not shut yet and if the economy turns, so could sentiment towards hybrid work.
(See also Be Explicit about the New Rules as We Return to the Office and Offices for All.)
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