The majority of Amazon (AMZN) employees are overwhelmingly unhappy with CEO Andy Jassy’s new return-to-office (RTO) mandate and are considering looking for new jobs, according to a recent survey conducted by Team Blind, an anonymous social platform for verified tech workers. A poll of more than 2,500 Amazon employees found that 91 percent are “dissatisfied” with the new five-day in-office policy, which will come into effect in January 2025. “My morale for this job is gone,” one said in a post.
Like most other tech companies, Amazon embraced remote work during the pandemic and has since reverted to a three-day in-office policy. Now, in an effort to rebuild the company’s culture and boost collaboration, Jassy’s RTO measure will only allow employees to work from home under extenuating circumstances like illnesses. The change will help ensure Amazon operates “like the world’s largest startup,” according to the CEO.
Amazon employees don’t appear to share Jassy’s sentiments. Blind’s survey was conducted between Sept. 17 (a day after Jassy announced the RTO mandate) to Sept. 19 and found that three quarters of polled workers are considering looking for another job because of the new policy, while 32 percent said they know someone who has quit recently in response to Jassy’s mandate.
Amazon’s HR is scrambling to fill the void. “I just had an Amazon recruiter blow up my phone and inbox five times in the last 24 hours to get me to provide my availability for an onsite interview,” said a Microsoft (MSFT) employee on Blind, adding that the recruiter said hiring managers are frustrated by the amount of Amazon candidates who have dropped out of interview processes in response to the news.
For Amazon employees who were hired remotely, some are viewing the mandate as a thinly veiled strategy to cut headcount. The company’s workforce reportedly surged by nearly 75 percent between March 2020 and September 2021 alone. “Many of those folks are concerned that they don’t live anywhere close to an office, and they were hired with the expectation of being remote,” Rick Chen, Blind’s head of public relations, told Observer.
Only a small percentage of employees are okay with RTO, with 9 percent saying they are “satisfied” with Jassy’s mandate. “There were some defenders of the policy, folks that prefer to work in the office and disliked remote work,” said Chen, who noted that a few Amazon employees also suggested that the end of remote work was caused by a few “bad apples'” who “ruined it for everyone by taking quiet vacations or slacking off.”
Amazon’s RTO mandate sends chill across Big Tech
Another trending response to Amazon’s RTO policy is concern amongst other Big Tech workers that their company is next. In addition to worried employees from Apple (AAPL), Meta (META) and Google (GOOGL), all of which also currently have a three-day in-office policy, Microsoft professionals—who are allowed to work remotely 50 percent of the time—have overwhelmingly voiced concerns that Microsoft will follow Amazon’s lead, according to Chen. This could be due to a geographic connection, as both Amazon and Microsoft are based near Seattle, Wash., he said.
Such comments echo those made in 2022 and 2023 when large tech companies announced layoffs one after the other, said Chen. “The was a feeling among professionals then, and it’s resurfacing now, that these companies are moving in lockstep with one another.”
Blind has noticed an unusual uptick in search volume for the term “RTO” since Jassy’s announcement. While the phrase was previously searched by 500 employees on a daily basis at the beginning of 2024, that figure has since doubled this month to 1,000, Chen said. Other keywords like “remote work” and “flexible work” have also gained popularity in lieu of previously common search terms like “layoffs,” “manager” and “promotion.”
“It’s a very extreme shift in terms of what is capturing Amazon professionals’ mind space right now,” said Chen.