What’s really behind Big Tech’s return-to-office mandates?

On this week’s episode of Decoder, we’re talking about work. Specifically, where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radically changed by the covid-19 pandemic, and how those expectations feel like they’re on the verge of changing yet again. For many people, the pendulum has swung wildly between working fully remote and now a push to return to the office from their bosses, and there are a lot of theories about what might be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back.

Here on Decoder, I’ve talked to lots of CEOs about the benefits of working fully remote versus hybrid or having everybody back in the office over the past several years, and I’ve heard the full spectrum of responses. Some executives are adamant that people need to be in the office, and others are equally adamant that fully remote is the way to go. We’ll play some of those answers for you as we go so you can get a sense of the enormous range of opinions here.

If you look at the surveys, it’s basically 50/50 — quite a lot of people want to work remotely, and they can be pretty loud online. But there are a lot of people, who are often quieter, who want to go back to the office for pretty good reasons. Some folks just don’t have the space to work from home, or they’re simply tired of making video calls in sweatpants all day and never really leaving the house. I know some people who really like just being able to leave work at the office when they head home for the day, and I’ve heard from a lot of younger people who are struggling to get face time with the more senior and experienced people at their companies in order to build relationships and grow their networks.

The messy middle of all this is what quite a few companies have settled on: hybrid work, which allows for a combination of in-office and remote work. This is how The Verge runs, and I quite like it — but it’s not perfect. Like so many people who work in a hybrid environment, there are days where I go into a mostly empty office and then sit on Zoom in a phone booth, and there are days when I realize I’m the only one in a meeting sitting at home because everyone else has gone into the office. 

Figuring out how to make hybrid work is a long-term cultural project that we really only started in 2020. While there are some obvious benefits, it’s not clear if anyone’s really cracked it in a way that scales across different kinds of companies.

Now, some companies have decided the nuance just isn’t worth it. In September, Amazon mandated that all employees would return to an office five days a week starting in January. In the memo announcing the change, CEO Andy Jassy argued that the company had “observed that it’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture,” that “collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective,” and that “teams tend to be better connected to one another” when everyone is in the office.

Amazon isn’t alone in wanting employees back at their desks. Companies like Disney and Salesforce have also pushed for employees to come back to the office at least four days a week, making similar arguments. Other companies, like Apple, have been steadily pressuring workers to come back for quite some time — that beautiful new spaceship office in Cupertino wasn’t built to stay empty. 

But is the return to office really about building company culture and being more creative and productive? I have to tell you, there is a huge chunk of The Verge and Decoder audience that is absolutely convinced that any big return-to-office policy change is actually just a layoff in disguise — we get emails making this case virtually every time one of these moves is announced.

Jassy even addressed this directly, just a few days ago, in an all-hands meeting. Responding to claims that the return-to-work mandate is a quote “backdoor layoff,” he told employees that that is simply not true. We’ll come back to that later on. 

So I wanted to know what’s been going on, what the real reasons behind return-to-office might be, and where this is all headed next. To explain it, I caught up with two experts on the subject: Stephan Meier, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, and Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at workplace culture consultancy Culture Partners. 

We dive into what’s been happening to the nature of work today, and you’ll hear both of them lay out some of the key reasons behind the return-to-office push. We also try to figure out whether Amazon is just an outlier or, as you’ll hear Jessica say, “the tip of the spear” in what could be something much bigger.

Here are some of the news stories, surveys, and studies we discussed in this episode, if you’d like to learn more: