---
title: "Amazon’s Return To Office Mandate Is A Huge Mistake"
source: "https://ehandbook.com/amazons-return-to-office-mandate-is-a-huge-mistake-a14fe69cea46"
author:
  - "[[Joe Procopio]]"
published: 2024-10-03
created: 2024-10-29
description: "Amazon announced a return to office mandate that could wind up causing collateral damage to their own bottom line. Here's are four major reasons why."
tags:
  - "clippings"
---
## Amazon dropped a bomb that could wind up causing collateral damage to their own bottom line. Here’s why.

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==A couple weeks before Amazon announced their empire-wide return-to-office mandate, one that requires all Amazon employees to come back to work on-site 5 days a week, I happened to be having drinks with a close friend who is head of HR at a high-growth-stage tech startup with a universal remote work policy.==

She told me she had inside information that one of her “competitors for talent” was about to mandate a return-to-office for all of their employees, and she was already eagerly poaching, with great success.

She didn’t tell me it was Amazon. Until now. So I didn’t include that information in the column I wrote about our conversation, which was focused on the [top reasons why tech folks weren’t getting the love they deserved in the recruiting process](https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/an-honest-recruiter-told-me-why-most-job-seekers-dont-get-hired.html).

But we did talk about that mandate. At length.

So I took what she told me and went down my own rabbit hole. And I discovered that Amazon is probably making a huge mistake.

Here are a number of self-inflicted wounds they just caused, maybe without realizing it.

## You just shrunk your talent pool by up to 90%

Look, I’m trying very hard to be balanced on the entire RTO issue.

I can definitely see the benefits of having the entire workforce in the same building(s), and I can empathize with the shock to the system that the pandemic put on companies as it forced work-from-home in 2020.

But there’s empathy and then there’s math. This is math.

Long before WFH was a perk (now), and long before it was a requirement (2020), it was a *strategy* — one typically employed by companies that wanted to hire top talent across various roles but were physically located in regions that either suffered from a dearth in talent or an inflation of the cost of that talent.

Good luck hiring talent in Peoria. Good luck hiring any talent in San Francisco that can afford to live in or near San Francisco. Add those two demographic characteristics together and you have pretty much all of the US and most of the world.

So any company requiring on-site work is limiting their talent pool to their specific physical location(s). Amazon probably “no-big-deals” this because they are literally everywhere. But still, for every location where they have a physical presence, there will be at least one other company like my HR friend’s company, cut-throat competing for that same talent.

There’s no win here.

## You just took a major morale hit

One of the problems with a return-to-office mandate is the word “mandate.” You’d think smart people who run tech companies would notice that. You’d think they’d approach the issue with more nuance.

You’d think.

I have many friends who work for Amazon, two of whom I talked about in a previous column outlining [the hoops companies like Amazon make applicants jump through](https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/tech-companies-cant-find-good-employees-its-their-own-fault.html) during the interview process.

At a certain skill level, pretty much anything above entry level, these kinds of one-size-fits-all methods of treating employees become less and less efficient.

“It’s demoralizing for sure, borderline degrading,” one of my friends said. “There is zero need for me to be on campus. I could live with making an appearance a couple days a week, but… I’m going to get all corporate here. What does that say about their belief in me as a contributor?”

He’s not wrong. Oh, also, he’s looking.

The truth is that in a lot of cases, RTO mandates are smokescreens for a broader talent contribution problem. Again, no win here.

## You just took a major productivity hit

In the [original column that started me down this topic trail](https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/return-to-office-mandates-are-finally-unquestionably-dead.html), I made it very clear that I was not arguing for one side against another, but that it had become very clear to me that the argument itself was no longer about convenience versus productivity, but a seismic shift in how people view their work, their jobs, and ultimately their careers.

It’s evolution, not revolution. And to mistake the former for the latter reveals a huge blind spot in most corporate executive suites.

Also, in that column, I talked about my own experience finding that *even in the office*, most of my work was being done digitally — collaborating on software in the cloud, internal and external meetings using video tech, even random discussions over Slack and text.

People are used to this now. It’s the way they work. In 2024, the only thing the RTO mandates do is add [a commute and a bunch of other productivity hits](https://www.inc.com/joe-procopio/the-return-to-office-productivity-argument-is-over.html) to now-universally-accepted processes.

That’s not a win.

## You just became the champion of a real estate crisis you created

I get the corporate real estate thing. I really do.

But the buildup in major metro areas that happened before and during the pandemic — fueled by a generation of millennials that saw a higher quality of life finally wander within their reach — was always a mirage. When inflation followed, it revealed not an oasis, but a very expensive desert.

Remember 2018? Remember all the “HQ2s” being announced by companies like Amazon and Apple and Google? Remember all the local government tax incentives being offered and all the groundbreaking ceremonies?

Of course you do.

Remember all the pushback on those HQ2s that started happening around 2019 and early 2020?

Nope! Because pandemic.

Again, *I side with the effort* to build huge corporate temples at or near places where a lot of people live. But my favorite offices have always been dumps that are easy to get to and are filled with a lot of people I like seeing every day.

If you’re going to build a temple, you’re going to need a lot of congregants.

I think I have that right.

## I know what Amazon is trying to do

It just doesn’t work like that anymore.

And to be honest, there are no dummies there. I believe they’ve done the math and the calculations and probably forecasted the collateral damage and wrote a future press release about it.

This will probably work for them. In the long run.

But I can tell you this. Neither return-to-office or remote-work are hills to die on. The best way to optimize talent is to foster that talent, and the best way to foster talent is to foster the individual. This is true in management, in leadership, and in corporate culture.

Until we realize that, we’re just going to keep screaming at each other about commutes and productivity.

I’ll keep tracking that argument and other pitfalls in the tech industry, [so please join my email list at joeprocopio.com](https://www.joeprocopio.com/).