Amazon just hit its employees with an UNO reverse card.
CEO Andy Jassy announced on Monday that Amazon’s nearly 350,000 corporate employees will be required to work in the office five days a week, effective Jan. 2. It’s a move away from its current mandate of three days a week that it adopted in early 2023. Amazon was one of the first major corporations to call workers back into the office post-pandemic, and has said those who don’t comply will be denied promotions.
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward—our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances,” Jassy said in his memo to Amazon employees, noting exemptions including sickness and business travel.
“It’s puzzling that [Amazon] would choose to move from essentially the most popular work arrangement to the least,” Joe Mull, keynote speaker and author, told HR Brew.
Here’s how Mull and Deborah Grayson Riegel, a communication and leadership expert, recommend people pros help employees navigate a shift in RTO plans.
Sit in the mess with employees. An HR professional’s first order of business following an announcement like Amazon’s is to take time to “sit in the shit” with employees, Grayson Riegel told HR Brew.
While in-person work may ultimately benefit employees by leading to more collaboration and visibility, in the first few weeks, Grayson Riegel said, they need empathy from their people leaders.
“There’s often an instinct to want to cheerlead, however, cheerleading for somebody who’s experienced losses is the opposite of empathy,” she said. She recommended telling employees, “We understand that this is hard. I imagine you may be feeling both tangible and intangible losses.”
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Tangible losses can be the flexibility to walk kids to school or take a morning yoga class, while intangible losses include diminishing agency, freedom, and autonomy, she said.
Hampering quality of life. While Jassy acknowledged that “extenuating circumstances” may warrant special flexibility, Mull said that this doesn’t help employees who require long-term accommodations.
“There’s a difference between accommodating people when there are incidents versus accommodating people for the challenges of life that we face now that are not incidental. They’re a part of how we live,” he said, pointing to the childcare crisis as an example.
Amazon’s policy feels misplaced, Mull said, especially in light of the Surgeon General’s recent advisory calling on employers to do more to support their working parents.
“Parents aren’t okay, and that advisory made recommendations…that [employers] continue to work on better workplace cultures and embrace flexible work policies,” he said, later adding that working parents may be thinking, “Now, this job has just added time to my commute, [taken] time away from my family. It’s added cost to me for caring for my family. It’s added stress to me for figuring out how I’m going to manage that.”
It’s crucial for HR pros to lead with empathy, he said, and acknowledge how certain policies may make situations harder for employees.
In response to a request for comment, Amazon pointed HR Brew to the memo in which it announced the RTO mandate.