Amazon’s RTO hasn’t affected other companies’ office policies

Typically, other employers look to Amazon, one of the biggest employers and one of the most valuable companies in the country, to set the tone on workplace trends.

But the internet behemoth’s announcement in September that workers would be expected back in the office full time next year might be too retrograde to copy.

Overall, the share of US companies that require people to be in the office full time declined slightly since last quarter, according to new data from Flex Index, which monitors office policies across more than 13,000 companies. Meanwhile, some 68% of companies offer at least some flexibility in where people work. In other words, not much has changed.

Generally, businesses have been moving to a hybrid model, where workers are required to come into the office some of the time. Since the beginning of 2023, both the share of companies that were fully flexible and fully in-office have declined.

Perhaps it’s because in the year 2024, requiring people to go to the office full time is not only ineffectual but a really bad look.

Stanford economist and remote-work expert Nick Bloom, who gave a presentation alongside the Flex Index findings, highlighted some recent studies about remote work that found return-to-office mandates don’t improve employee or company performance. Bad performance is also what leads companies to make such announcements in the first place. The announcements themselves, in addition to upsetting workers, have the compounding effect of insinuating that a company isn’t doing well. (Indeed, many have suggested that Amazon’s policy is actually just a way to reduce headcount without calling it layoffs.)

Of course, none of this is a big problem for Amazon — but other companies have to tread more carefully.