Amazon’s RTO mandate leaves working moms behind
Good morning, Broadsheet readers! Tupperware filed for bankruptcy, Joanna Geraghty’s JetBlue is opening its first airport lounges, and Fortune writer Jane Thier examines how return-to-office mandates like Amazon’s may put women—especially mothers—at a disadvantage. Have a restful weekend.
- The end of flex. On Monday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that employees would be mandated to return to the office five days a week. “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,” Jassy wrote in a memo to employees titled “strengthening our culture and teams.”
Jassy acknowledged that “some of our teammates may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments,” but nonetheless, five days is the new expectation come the new year.
After the news broke, several Amazon employees told Fortune’s Jason Del Rey that they believe the new mandate actively runs counter to the company’s purported people-first mission. It also is likely to create an instant hemorrhage of top talent fleeing the tech giant for employers more amenable to flexibility and choice, workplace experts say.
Some hard-charging companies may be tempted to copy Amazon’s moves, given that it’s “one of the largest private-sector employers in the world, and the second-largest in the U.S.,” Del Rey wrote. “On the other hand, competitors could seize on the mandate to attract talented Amazon workers looking for more flexible work.”
Employees pointed out that this mandate is harsher than prior to the pandemic. “Please do note that this is (in a lot of cases) significantly more strict and out of its mind than many teams operated under pre-COVID,” one Amazon employee wrote in an internal Slack channel, per a Business Insider report. “I’m interested in working for a living, not live-action role playing and virtue signaling,” an Amazon Web Services engineer wrote on LinkedIn, donning an “#opentowork” halo around his profile picture.
Return-to-office or “RTO” mandates are near-uniformly unpopular with employees. But the nitty-gritty of RTO mandates are particularly fraught for women—mothers in particular, who most often bear the brunt of caregiving and household upkeep.
Nearly two-thirds of C-suite leaders whose companies have mandated an office return say the policy has led a disproportionate number of women to quit, as Kelly Monahan, who directs research at freelancing platform Upwork, told Fortune over the summer. There’s not even an upside for the boss; more than half of executives told Upwork that losing female employees ended up tanking company productivity—the very thing mandates are supposedly designed to boost.
Nearly nine in 10 women, per a survey by International Workplace Group, believe flexible work is an equalizer; two-thirds say such an arrangement lessens the biases they face. Almost 75% of women said they’d instantly look for a new job if their employer removed their hybrid work plans.
Women’s day-to-day work experience remains largely unexamined, Annie Dean, workplace futurist and head of Team Anywhere at workplace software firm Atlassian tells Fortune. “There are ‘pinch points’ in various phases of life, especially for working mothers, when the ability to commute and spend the majority of waking hours in an office is impractical,” she added. “But this in no way impacts a woman’s ability to do her highest-level work.”
To be sure, in-person work is valuable, insofar as it fosters collaboration, idea exchange, and simply getting to know the people one works with day in, day out. But, research has proven time and again, that same value can be fostered without compulsory daily attendance. In fact, Dean points out, daily office attendance, when compared with just a handful of days per week or month in person, actually negatively impacts business performance. Dean calls choices like Amazon’s “especially egregious.”
“There’s nothing that correlates higher in-office time with better performance; in fact it’s the opposite,” Monahan notes. “That doesn’t mean you have to be 100% remote—and women aren’t always asking for that—just time for life outside of work.”
Jane Thier
jane.thier@fortune.com
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
