Laszlo Bock, consultant and former Google senior executive, likened Andy Jassy’s demand that Amazon employees spend five days a week in the office to ordering the usual at a restaurant.
Say the hamburger is your pick of choice at the regular joint and you all of a sudden go for the grilled chicken, Bock suggested. The chicken turns out to be okay, “no better than the hamburger, it’s no worse.” Naturally, you’ll revert back to the burger, or the norm.
“You default back to what you’re comfortable with,” Bock told Fortune. The Gretel AI data platform cofounder is a corporate culture expert and was senior people exec at Google from 2006 to 2016, a period during which the tech giant was named Best Company to Work For dozens of times. “Why would you ever have the chicken sandwich again?” he asked.
It’s a classic tale of executives falling back into the familiar schedule of fully in-person work after five years of attempting or waffling on flexible, remote, or hybrid schedules. Joining the ranks this week was Amazon, as Jassy increased the mandated number of in-office days from three to five, in a note sent to employees on Monday. Amazon responded to requests for comment by referring Fortune to said memo.
The memo, posted on the company site, stressed the importance of in-person attendance as nourishment for company culture and collaboration. It also outlined changing the structure to reducer staff in management positions.
Bock called the move “a triumph of traditional management over innovative management,” explaining that the latter style is more difficult and needs more data to support its implementation.
Why do execs detest flexible work?
Hybrid work can be a successful boost to productivity if managed well, said Bock, pointing to early studies, work from companies like Atlassian that host community events, and the success of employers implementing focal days. During the early days of the pandemic, productivity increased after companies put effort into their plans. In turn, employees responded positively to it, added Bock, author of the New York Times bestseller Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google to Transform How You Live and Lead.
Yet to actually do hybrid work well requires resources, a clear plan, and above all, buy in. Most companies aren’t looking to put in the effort without guaranteed results, therefore dampening the potential benefit of mixed-mode work. In the absence of an effective flexible schedule, hybrid work’s cons became all the more clear— including a diffuse culture, feeling of disconnect, generic culture, and managers who don’t feel in control, he said.
“From a company perspective there is not clear, overwhelming evidence that this is good,” Bock said And because it’s such a change, executives need an evidence windfall to alter course. “Employees love it” because it values their autonomy and freedom. But they lose out when employers, especially big ones like Amazon that struggle due to their size, pull out of hybrid plans.
In a sense companies fumbled the bag on hybrid work, giving up on a new strategy once it stopped being sexy enough. Or in other words, executives “created a self fulfilling prophecy that is now dragging people back to the office kicking and screaming.”
Will Amazon actually lose talent?
Amazon’s announcement wasn’t exactly met with open arms. Some employees expressed dismay and disapproval over the mandate, as one posted on Slack that it’s a sign of “going backwards,” according to Business Insider.
Companies run the risk of losing out on top talent when they shirk flexibility, but Bock seems to think that Amazon isn’t running a terrible gamble here. “Very few people vote with their feet,” he said, adding that the strategy likely won’t hurt the company in the long run. Even though it’s controversial and many remote or hybrid Amazonians are likely peeved, many won’t leave, he noted. And successful companies will continue to have a large talent pool to draw from even if they are rolling out polarizing ultimatums, he said.
As for the new management strategy, Bock sees it as a way to pare micromanaging. It’s a “very clear call for productivity, but it’s also a call for managers focusing on actually making things work better,” he said. He referenced Google’s rule of seven, which didn’t hire managers for teams with fewer than seven employees as to disperse their time and tamp down over involvement that could border on control.
Even so, with all this change, he “imagine[s] it’s going to be a very stressful time for managers at Amazon.” Despite getting flamed online, this isn’t all that out of the ordinary for Amazon. It “reflects their values,” as a tight organizational culture which is intense and is rooted in close management, he said.
Calling the memo “entirely expected and actually quite thoughtful,” Bock praised their data-driven approach and added that many companies will likely follow suit. And this approach perhaps is better in the long-term as humans crave social connection and tend to lose that during poorly executed hybrid plans, he added.
Rather than simply issuing an edict like a banking CEO who simply sees RTO as important, Amazon is tying its mandate to internal data and culture, he explained Bock. While some companies tried to wait for the (still impending) downturn to get their in-office way and others went for the incremental “boil the frog” route, neither turned out all that effective
But Amazon will likely get its way. “They will force it…they’ll make it happen,” said Bock. He has “no doubt they’re going to measure it and monitor it” and that “they’re going to fire people for noncompliance.”
And more edicts might be forthcoming. Amazon is a sort of bellwether for others, and “all of tech has kind of moved in this direction,” noted Bock. In other words, “most companies just don’t put in the effort, and they just keep ordering the cheeseburger.”
