In mid-September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the company was reinstating a five-day workweek in the office. While effectively forcing employees back into the office full-time and ending Amazon’s hybrid work policy, Jassy claimed a full Return-to-Office (RTO) will help staff be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected to each other.”

This follows PwC announcing plans to use geolocation technology to track the location of UK employees to ensure they are in the office or at a client site at least three days a week. “Face-to-face working is hugely important to a people business like ours,” said Laura Hinton, managing partner at PwC UK.

Earlier this year, Manchester Utd part-owners INEOS also ended the club’s hybrid working policy and ordered staff back into the office five days a week. “We believe connection and collaboration is best achieved when everyone works together in close proximity,” read an internal email. “Although hybrid working has some benefits, it cannot replace the value of people being physically together.”

You might be noticing a trend here.

It’s far too easy to get bogged down in arguments over remote vs office working, and what impact each has on ‘collaboration’ (this being the favourite term of RTO announcements). Media coverage and opinion pieces tend to focus on the benefits of remote and hybrid policies, with various research and studies routinely cited.

For instance, a Forbes Advisor study found hybrid working increased workplace productivity by 48.8% along with lowering business costs and increasing employee retention, while an FRS Recruitment Employment Insights Report found nine out of ten workers believe they are as productive or more productive when working from home, with over 75% of employers agreeing. McKinsey research found 77% of employees feel they are more productive working from home, while a Gallup study found exclusively remote and hybrid employees have significantly higher engagement than on-site workers.

Case closed, right?

Not quite.

While respondents to the aforementioned Gallup survey cited improved work-life balance, higher productivity and less burnout/fatigue as advantages of hybrid working, they also noted feeling less connected to organisational culture, decreased collaboration with teams and less cross-functional collaboration generally, along with impaired working relationships with co-workers.

Similarly, a paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found remote work leads to trade-offs, whereby short-term output and productivity increases – especially among senior workers – but at the expense of long-term human capital development. More specifically, remote work and lack of physical proximity lead to decreases in critical informal training and mentorship of more junior, less-experienced employees, bringing a major future cost.

The NBER research found even one individual’s choice to work remotely impacts their office-based peers, i.e. when experienced employees work from home, junior workers may learn less, impacting both their individual output and mobility to graduate to higher-paying jobs at other firms or leadership roles within their current firm. According to the NBER, the rise of remote work could have “scarring effects” on less experienced workers for the above reasons, while even a single remote worker can have an outsized impact, negatively impacting collaboration between co-located co-workers.

In Zero to One (2014), Peter Thiel notes an integral aspect of business success is building a strong team that shares a common vision, with a talented and motivated group of individuals aligned with the company’s mission and values. Fair enough, but Thiel also adds: “Working remotely should be avoided, because misalignment can creep in whenever colleagues aren’t together full-time, in the same place, every day.”

While Thiel’s comments were written over a decade ago, when remote work was not the norm, the results from the Gallup survey and NBER seem to lend credence to Thiel’s point. Should one conclude a full five-day RTO policy is the only way to ensure a committed and motivated workforce?

In a recent focus group, leaders in the ICT space noted that new starters working under remote and hybrid conditions were not progressing as fast as previous entirely office-based cohorts. They cited a loss of “osmosis learning” as a major issue, whereby physical proximity allows less experienced employees to soak up critical, though often informal, work-related knowledge from more experienced peers. Across the board, senior employees claimed to be more productive when working from home, but this was having a major impact on the progression and growth of their less experienced colleagues.

Even when senior employees agreed to come into the office two or three days a week, junior colleagues weren’t necessarily getting to spend enough time with them to ensure critical knowledge transfer or mentorship opportunities – especially in cases where days were not properly coordinated, i.e. junior employees were not in the office on the same days as senior colleagues. How to incentivise a return to the office was cited as a challenge.

But this gets to the crux of the matter.

Incentivisation vs enforced RTO. Trust and autonomy vs command-and-control.

The organisations we spoke to weren’t interested in forcing their employees back into the office. They recognised the importance of empowering employees with the freedom and autonomy to do their best work and where they felt most comfortable. However, they also recognised creating a sense of ownership and belonging, along with providing mentorship/learning opportunities, can be more challenging under remote conditions.

But this didn’t deter them from offering remote and hybrid work for their employees, or asking the right questions that would allow them to craft a better hybrid work policy. For example, can the mentorship benefits of in-person work be achieved through a few days per week in the office? Can alternative management practices encourage more training of junior workers? Especially when so much of mentorship and learning opportunities are based on informal interactions rather than formalised training.

The easy answer is to mandate a full RTO five days per week. But this misses the point entirely, as Andy Jassy does when he says, “we’ve decided we’re going to return to…the way we were before the onset of COVID.”

Rather than looking at new ways to innovate, collaborate and be connected in a hybrid world, Amazon are trying to turn back the clock and take a twentieth century approach to a twenty-first century challenge. Not only is this a return to presenteeism, with presence in the office interpreted as commitment, but it’s also a return to a command-and-control style of leadership along with potentially having a massive impact on diversity & inclusion. According to Professor Nick Bloom of Stanford, organisations who enforce a full five-day RTO will likely see their workforce skew younger and more male with less diversity. As workplace expert and author Bruce Daisley notes, 10% of the global workforce care for a parent, a larger number have parental responsibilities for children and there are millions of people who need to think about the welfare of their pets – which demonstrates how the expectations and needs of workers have evolved in recent years, to say nothing about other aspects of work-life balance, i.e. mental health. Unsurprisingly, Bloom estimates that 30% of Amazon staff will quit over these changes, which Daisley feels may be Amazon’s real goal.

“Soft layoffs,” or getting workers to leave without severance and avoiding legal complications, aren’t a new strategy. According to a CNBC article, former business leader turned workplace expert Laurie Ruettimann admits employing “soft layoff” tactics in 2001, i.e. restructuring reporting responsibilities to make workers feel less comfortable and subtly increasing workload to make the working environment “unappealing” to the point said worker(s) quit. In 2024, RTO mandates may perform the same task, removing perks such as flexibility or being able to care for others at home along with saving time and money on commuting. It’s the perfect strategy to get those who aren’t 100% “committed” to the organisation’s mission, vision and values to quit “voluntarily,” avoiding the potential drop in morale that direct layoffs can produce, which can affect productivity and lead to speculation around the organisation’s financial health, according to the CNBC article.

While it’s not our place to speculate on Amazon’s true intentions, it’s worth noting Jassy opened the memo by announcing Amazon would be laying off 15% of their middle management, which demonstrates they are restructuring and downsizing certain areas of the organisation. Similarly, Adrienne Gonzalez feels PwC, which is currently facing a decrease in demand for its advisory services and higher than expected employee attrition, is bringing in “Orwellian” practices around geolocation tracking because it wants people to quit.

Last week, the FT reported PwC UK profits fell 14 per cent to £1.1bn, as total revenue growth slowed to 9 per cent compared with 16 per cent in 2023 amid a more difficult economic backdrop. UK partners will only take home £862,000 compared to £906,000 in 2023, down from £1 million in 2022. Three years ago, PwC made record-breaking profit of £1.2bn when the majority of its staff was working from home. What changed?

“Business is slow, people aren’t leaving, and there’s a lot of dead weight sitting on the payroll,” writes Gonzales. “(If) RTO mandates are intended to make people quit, RTO mandates with a side of Orwellian tracking will get the job done faster and more effectively. All without the icky layoff headlines.”

A 2023 report from Microsoft found lack of confidence in leadership to be the main reason workers switched roles, with 54% of workers feeling their leadership is out of touch and 53% finding trust difficult to build. In an environment marked by a cost-of-living crisis along with great geopolitical and economic uncertainty, RTO mandates will further erode trust in employers. Especially when the message from coming from employers to employees is we don’t trust you. A full five-day RTO mandate says we don’t trust you to work from home, while geolocation tracking says we don’t trust you full stop. Throw in accusations around the real purpose behind RTO mandates (soft layoffs) and it’s another step backwards. If remote working leads to trade-offs – i.e. short-term boost in productivity but long term impact on human capital development – then enforcing RTO mandates will likely lead to serious trade-offs like a short-term boost in collaboration but long-term erosion of trust in leadership.

Yes, rise of remote and hybrid work models have introduced new layers of complexity. Virtual communication barriers, feelings of isolation and the lack of face-to-face interaction are very real challenges. And yes, misalignment can be more likely to creep in under remote conditions, since it’s often harder for dispersed employee to connect with an organisation’s mission, vision and values.

But the genie of remote and hybrid working cannot be put back into the bottle, nor can the clock be turned back: it is the responsibility of management and leadership teams to overcome the challenges these models give rise to. RTO mandates offer easy answers but in the long run will likely do far more harm than good. Incentivising people to work in the office is preferable, but maybe overly simplistic.

Instead, as people’s expectations of work evolve, organisations must rethink performance and culture. RTO mandates ignore the shift we’ve seen in recent years around workplace culture, performance expectations and employee engagement. The challenge for leaders isn’t getting people back into the office, but rather how to redesign organisational environments to meet these new expectations, and how to foster innovation, inclusion and collaboration under hybrid and remote conditions. Being in the office together under one roof still has a vital role to play, but it’s not a silver bullet for workplace culture.

To truly unlock employee potential and ensure long-term success, leaders must foster a collaborative culture where employees are empowered to innovate and contribute fully. This requires a commitment to continuous learning and mentoring, along with ensuring every individual is aligned with the organisation’s mission, vision, purpose and values. It’s about creating an environment where innovation is second nature, allowing people to adopt swiftly to new challenges. Encouraging continuous learning and upskilling ensures teams remain at the cutting edge of innovation, while fostering psychological safety ensures teams feel safe to experiment, fail and learn on their innovation journey.

These are the questions that should be keeping leaders up at night.