Amazon’s RTO push is an outlier — the tech world remains all in on hybrid work

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ordered employees back to the office five days a week.

Some tech workers are being dragged back to the office — whether they like it or not.

Unpopular return-to-office mandates at Amazon and Dell have made headlines in recent months as workers protest the strict new rules.

But while it may seem that workers are losing the battle for remote work, research suggests hybrid work is still the norm in the tech industry.

A study from Flex Index, a platform that tracks flexible work policies, found most tech companies still had hybrid or remote policies as of this summer.

The research, which analyzed the policies of 2,670 tech companies, found that in June, 79% were “fully flexible,” meaning they didn’t mandate office time from employees — a slight increase from the same study conducted in June 2023.

A mere 3% of the tech firms required employees to be back in the office full time, compared with the 18% that were “structured hybrid,” meaning some office days are mandated.

The picture was slightly different at the largest tech companies. The more employees a company had, the more likely they were to adopt a structured hybrid system.

Just shy of three-quarters of companies with more than 25,000 employees had adopted a structured hybrid policy, compared with 37% of tech firms with 500 to 5,000 employees. The data suggests that Amazon and Dell are outliers in the tech world.

In comparison with the same research published in June 2023, this recent study suggests tech companies of all sizes have been shifting at least incrementally toward hybrid work, with larger firms leading the charge.

“On the employer’s side, I think most of them would prefer going back to regular office hours,” Peter Cappelli, a professor of management at Wharton Business School, told Business Insider.

“But it is a huge irritation to employees to pull back a benefit employees really appreciate, especially because employers are not giving them anything in return nor have made much of any effort to persuade them why it’s necessary,” he said.

As Big Tech companies mull how far to take their RTO policies, one thing is clear — hybrid work is the perk to have in the race for top talent.

Talent wars

Employees love flexibility at work. In a survey of 17,087 employees conducted by the Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, workers said they considered the right to work two or three days a week from home as valuable as an 8% pay rise.

Employees under strict RTO mandates at Amazon and Dell have been vocal about their lack of enthusiasm for the new rules, with some at Dell forsaking promotions in favor of remaining remote.

In the current landscape, this probably means Big Tech companies with a hybrid work policy will have an advantage when it comes to recruiting and retaining top talent.

Bloom, a world authority on remote work, told B-17 he didn’t expect other Big Tech firms to follow Amazon’s lead on RTO for this reason.

“Hybrid is too profitable to abandon,” he said. “The evidence is that hybrid is about as efficient as fully in-person — but hybrid is better for recruitment and retention.”

He said forcing employees back into the office full time could drive higher turnover, which can be costly for companies.

The tech world is also engaged in a brutal battle for talent, especially for top AI researchers. Last month, The Wall Street Journal reported that Google forked out $2.7 billion in a deal largely intended to get the AI scientist and startup founder Noam Shazeer back at the company.

Cevat Aksoy, an associate director of research at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development who’s also an associate professor of economics at King’s College London, told B-17 his research showed that a substantial portion of the workforce highly valued the option to work from home. He said many were willing to quit or seek new employment if ordered to return to the office full time.

“Companies adopting full RTO policies could face challenges in retaining talent,” Aksoy said. “Given the increasing demand for flexibility and the strong preferences many employees hold, we can expect hybrid work to remain a critical tool for companies seeking to stay competitive in attracting top talent.”

But five-day RTO initiatives have their supporters, too. John Rossman, who was an Amazon executive in the early 2000s, told B-17 the company was making the right move to “jump-start growth again.”

Efficiency, or else

In the past year, tech companies have been getting tough on remote workers, monitoring office card swipes and disciplining those who don’t follow the rules.

While some large companies, such as Nvidia, have remained holdouts, most Big Tech companies have had hybrid policies of various degrees.

But they’re also making no promises it will stay this way.

Microsoft and Google, which both have a hybrid policy that allows employees to work from home at least some of the time, recently issued a thinly veiled threat to workers: Keep productivity up if you want to avoid a full-time office return.

Aksoy said this worked as a way of ensuring accountability among tech workers.

“It’s likely a reminder to employees that hybrid work isn’t guaranteed— it’s tied to continued performance. This kind of message helps keep everyone focused on delivering results while giving the companies room to tighten policies if they start seeing any productivity issues or collaboration challenges,” he said.

That said, Aksoy still thinks it’s unlikely that Big Tech will bring employees back for five days a week.

“The benefits of hybrid work, both for companies and employees, are just too significant,” Aksoy said. “Plus, the hybrid model allows these companies to tap into a wider talent pool without being limited by geography. So as long as productivity stays up, I think hybrid work is here to stay in the tech world.”