Yesterday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy held a meeting to discuss the pending return to office mandate at Amazon. A summary of his defense of the mandate:
“This was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.”
As expected, the response is coming in hot.
Now go back 10 years, and consider this situation: you hire a new employee, and expect them to show up at work on their starting day.
Weird that we now consider that as just one option.
One hot take on the negative view of Jassy’s RTO mandate made these points on why Amazon will “risk losing talent”, citing a survey of 3,853 Americans conducted in February 2024:
* Remote work boosts critical areas like mental health and engagement.
* For most employees, full-time office work isn’t the ideal setup.
* Only a small portion of workers actually perform better in an on-site environment.
As I work from my screened porch this beautiful fall morning, I maintain my point of view that WFH vs. RTO is 100% dependent upon the organization, and senior leadership has the very visible responsibility of choosing the best path for their organization.
I’m on Jassy’s side here: “This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.”
The only thing in any business that leadership has 100% control over is the culture of the organization.
You can build and maintain great culture with WFH, RTO, or hybrid. Any of them will work.
Leaders get to (have to!) choose.
Amazon Mandates RTO
Comments
More from Kevin
-
Still using Google?!?
Other than a specific “Image Search”, I no longer use Google to search for anything. I use Grok. If you’re not familiar with Grok, it’s the artificial intelligence engine produced by xAI, one of Elon Musk’s businesses. Grok is fed real time data via the “firehose” that comes out of X. Why Grok? Why not…
-
Simplify Your A/V
Your conference rooms’ A/V does not have to be complicated. You should not have to “Call IT!!” to come fix your conference room’s A/V system. Ever. So why do we hear over and over and over the following mantra: “Yeah, can y’all come have a look at our conference rooms? Nothing ever works. Completely unreliable.”?…
-
Learning to Rappel
More Search & Rescue (aka “SAR”) training this past weekend. This time, it was all about rappelling. For some of you, rappelling might be your weekend go-to hobby. This was my 2nd time. We spend the weekend in north Georgia learning all the basics of rappelling. We learned all the knots: bowline, square knot, figure…
-
Where’s Your 3rd Office?
Where do you work when you’re on the road? Sometimes we work at home. Sometimes we work in the office. But some other times, we get to work from our “third office”! Sounds exciting, doesn’t it? OK, maybe not “exciting”, but it could be, depending on where you go. So, your home office has a…
-
IRL vs. Virtual
Got 47 seconds? Please watch this Gary Vaynerchuk video on Instagram:https://lnkd.in/e7mMuk5S What matters most in the processes deep inside your organization? Speed, efficiency, and effectiveness matter in business. Gary Vaynerchuk suggests that those things occur best in person, in the office, and tells a very familiar story to back it up. The common story, at…
-
ATL CRE 2025
Earlier this week, CBRE announced the complete (CBRE already owned 40%) purchase of Industrious, bringing to light the new business segment within CRE known as “Building Operations & Experience (BOE)”. See Patrick Braswell‘s analysis here:https://lnkd.in/evCBPMBM At the end of 2024, just a couple of weeks ago, the following stats were published by Commercial Edge (link:…
-
“Full RTO!”
So, now that we’re 2 weeks in to 2025, who has returned to the office full time? Amazon? Anyone? Beuller? We (TRANSCEND LV) visited a very cool space today, in which the IT staff is preparing for “full RTO”. They’re updating conference rooms from old tech to new, updating WiFi access points, and otherwise preparing…
-
What’s Your Home Office Setup?
OK, now that Atlanta has recovered from our (first?) snow of the 2025 Winter, let’s talk home office setup. Full disclosure: my home office setup consists of the following items. * Windows laptop* Bluetooth mouse* Levenger Stanley Journal* Sharpie S-Gel pen* WiFi via Amazon Eero / AT&T internet I do my very best to print…
-
No Snow Days
It’s gonna snow in Atlanta on Friday. Currently, my weather app says 5-6″ of snow from Friday at noon through Saturday morning at about 6AM. We’ll see. I always keep my expectations low, so I don’t get disappointed by just a few flurries. I. Want. Snow! Which brings me to the real point: WFH is…
Leave a comment