Will Amazon Ruin Hybrid Working?
Despite all the evidence pointing the other way, the Seattle leviathan is going to mandate a 5-day in-office workweek.
One of the many raison d’etres of this very newsletter was to help drive the fight against RTO mandates. It’s not the sole reason I began writing again, but it’s up there as one of the top ones. Did I think I would make a difference? Certainly not. Was it a good way to blow off steam instead of telling my managers how I felt about RTO? I think that was one of the justifications.
And I thought we had moved on from this debate. Our feudal lords (late-stage capitalism has way too much in common with feudalism, but that’s for another post) threw some extra bread crumbs the way of the peasant with a hybrid RTO mandate model: come in three days, work from home two days, and if you don’t completely screw up you can maintain this little arrangement. But Amazon is ruining this for all of us.
The RTO Detente
You can peruse the RTO “theme” of This Does Not Bode Well, but let’s do a quick recap anyway for those of you without the privilege of being TDNBW OGs.
We talked about how RTO’s enforcement mechanisms were mostly sticks and way too light on the carrots. It started with “We just won’t promote the remotes” and when that didn’t work, it turned into “Fine, you’re fired.” This is a fine strategy if you have bad management practices to begin with, but for a company that is supposed to be well-run, it’s not a winning solution.
And this was proven out of ACC powerhouse Pitt, when a study of theirs dropped in January of 2024, showing that RTO mandates had a neutral effect on corporate financial performance. So all of those RTO mandates literally did nothing for a company’s bottom line. After all the hand-wringing about lazy WFHers and needing to be in physical proximity to be productive, it turns out employees were actually dedicating a decent amount of the time saved from commuting for work.
So we settled into a detente of sorts. The economy was doing well. JPow was figuring out the Fed’s soft landing, creativity was aflame - combusting, even - and Sweetgreen was losing money at its normal, pre-Covid pace. Even Starbucks told their new CEO “Forget sustainability targets, WFH and just take the jet.”
And now this. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy let people know that while they may very well have gotten used to the three-day-a-week model nearly every other company was on, that wasn’t going to stop the Seattle retailer from turning back the clock on hybrid work. The big question is, why?
I Take My Coffee Black
For once, it may not be the C.R.E.A.M. Even Jassy has to admit in his memo that he likes “the direction in which we’re heading and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.” Indeed, the company has outperformed the S&P 500 over the past 12 months.
This newsletter has said in the past that it did not believe that RTO mandates were a means to the end goal of attrition. And it maintains that position when it comes to the 3-day hybrid model. Is that model a bit paternalistic, and borne out of a fear of loss of control, with the socialist-inspired “Save our downtowns” (but with private dollars) thrown in for a little razzle dazzle? Sure, but it’s also the expected settling point between billion-dollar corporations and the employees actually doing the shareholder value generating. While this newsletter maintains one or two mandated RTO days would be the ideal hybrid model, we can all agree three is much preferable to the quaint and backwards policy of five.
Multiple people have pointed out to me that attrition could very well be the goal of RTO mandates. Thinking about this case specifically, if the motivations aren’t to save Seattle (nothing in Jassy’s announcement indicated this), and it’s not because of an underperforming Amazon itself given its overperformance in the market, then it must be about attrition. Jassy says as much in his memo announcing the policy, bemoaning the increase in managers at the company.
Which makes the move so much more bewildering, as attrition by employee choice removes the control corporate leaders crave. Instead of picking the lowest performers on a team and right-sizing the ship by choosing how to de-ballast it, they’re simply letting the pieces fall where they may and hope to still have a solid puzzle to put together after.
Quiet Firing
While attrition may be the goal, quiet firing is a contributing motivator. No one likes to fire people or lay them off - it has to be one of the worst aspects of management and leadership. The goal is to avoid having to do this by hiring the right people (and, crucially, the right number of them.)
But this is the real world, and perfection in this space is not possible. So sometimes people or entire teams need to be made redundant, and Amazon is facing that specter right now. Jassy went into detail in his memo, demanding that teams increase their individual contributor to manager ratio by 15% (and, dear reader, it is not expected to be done by adding ICs.)
But the least Amazon could do is have these difficult conversations with the managers they want to let go, instead of trying to thin the herd with an ill-advised return to the old ways. The desire to avoid the pain of these kinds of admittedly awful conversations shouldn’t be so high as to drag the entire company back to pre-Covid office attendance rules.
For a company with such an intense focus on the customer and obsessing about how to make their experience as seamless as possible while providing the options they are looking for, this experience for their employees feels diametrically opposed to that philosophy.
Grab Bag Sections
WTF NYTimes: If you think way back to when Joe Biden was running (shuffling?) for president, the NYTimes would have what felt like a weekly article about whispers about his mental faculties and what that meant as a second-term president. It made sense, given his age and his “senior moments.”
But now we only have one septuagenarian in the presidential race and the same attention is not being paid to an elderly man who - and I’m not being sarcastic or funny here - is very clearly suffering a mental break. Between his answer about childcare that makes one weep for his Broca’s area and his assertion that people’s pets are being devoured by illegal aliens in Ohio, the man is not well. But, like most of the media since the rise of Trumpism, no one knows how to cover it.
If you were on the 6 train platform at Union Square and someone came up to you and yelled “They’re eating cats. They’re eating dogs. They’re eating people’s pets!” would you take that person seriously? The answer is no, you would not. That is, unless you work in journalism, in which case you would hedge your words when describing someone whose mental state is careening towards crisis.
Biden didn’t belong in the race, and mainstream journalists held him to task. Will they do the same for Trump? (Spoiler alert: They will not.)
Album of the Week: While “New Music Fridays” may feel like it’s been around forever, the reality is it’s less than a decade old. Back in my day, music was released on Tuesdays. Thanks to one of those idiosyncratic coincidences of history, 9/11 fell on a Tuesday and that particular week had a ton of big names drop new music. Given all of the logistics that went into albums released in the CD era (most importantly, the shipping and on-the-shelf retail aspect of CDs), the music was going to be released to the public regardless of one of the few single events in human history that can be considered as paradigm-shifting as 9/11 was.
In another coincidence, Jay-Z’s The Blueprint was moved up a week to be released on 9/11 due to concerns about bootlegging. Hova was not in a good place - he was facing two trials (one for stabbing record producer Un for bootlegging, hence the paranoia around moving up the release date) and was getting dissed by a who’s who of New York rap royalty at the time. The pressure was on for Jigga, and did he deliver.
The Blueprint is considered one of the greatest rap albums put out. It moved nearly half a million units its first week despite a subdued American mood (even if the Bush administration’s message to Americans was simply to “shop.”) It would eventually be selected for preservation in the Library of Congress. The album is, to put it lightly, credentialed.
The track list is pretty unbeatable. “Takeover” was considered one the best disses at the time as Jay shot back at Nas and Prodigy, among others. “Renegade” is one of the best rap songs ever produced, featuring Eminem on vocals (the only rap feature on the album) and in the production booth. The album made stars of producers Kanye West and Just Blaze. The only miss - and it’s a hard miss - was “Girls, Girls, Girls.” It wasn’t a good song then and it has since aged like cheese left out in the heat. It’s an easy skip.
While impressive on its own, even more insane is the fact that the album was created in two weeks, with the majority of it being recorded in a mere 48 hours. In this case it looks like pressure made diamonds, even if the album only went double platinum.
Quote of the Week: “You may delay, but time will not.” – Benjamin Franklin
See you next week!