Return to uncertainty

In the wake of the Federal Reserve lowering interest rates by half a percentage point in September, the stock market has been setting records, hiring numbers are trending strong, and the inflation rate has been slowly edging downward.

Nevertheless, many businesses — and workers — seem to be in a state of anxious uncertainty, awaiting the outcome of this fall’s tight, bitterly waged presidential election, as well as any signals that may give them a better insight into the economic outlook for 2025.

As Virginia Business Associate Editor Beth JoJack examines in her November cover story, Vibe check, companies are also trying to get a read on whether their employees might be watching for the right time to jump ship — a prospect that for many employers sets off traumatic flashbacks of the pandemic’s Great Resignation era and its attendant labor crunches.

You’d do well to keep this question on your radar. After all, in PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 2024 Global Workforce Hopes & Fears Survey, released in June, 28% of employees surveyed responded that they would be “very or extremely likely” to switch employers over the next 12 months. That may not sound like a lot — until you hear that during the height of the Great Resignation, just 19% of workers surveyed gave a similar answer.

So, it was a tad surprising that Amazon.com chose this moment to hurl a metaphorical bomb into the labor pool’s presently murky waters.

In mid-September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo directing all corporate staff to return to the office five days a week as of Jan. 2, effectively eliminating all options for hybrid work schedules “outside of extenuating circumstances.” The global e-tail Goliath, which has its East Coast headquarters, Amazon HQ2, in Arlington County, previously required employees to work at least three days a week in the office.

Jassy, who said he is also seeking to streamline bureaucracy and flatten management structures, noted that prior to the pandemic, people didn’t have expectations of working remote or hybrid schedules. And he said that he wanted Amazon, which had about 415,000 corporate employees as of 2022, to function like a startup, fostering “fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, [and] deeply connected collaboration.”

Needless to say, a lot of experts have been weighing in with thoughts on this move. Some analysts, perhaps cynically, have wondered if it isn’t an effort by Amazon to cut staffing without having to instigate layoffs. There will, after all, inevitably be employees who choose to quit because of this RTO mandate. One question is, how many? Will it kick off a wave of “rage applications” to other jobs? And will Amazon lose an edge in attracting and retaining in-demand talent, particularly in emerging sectors such as artificial intelligence? Competitors like Google, Meta and OpenAI still offer hybrid work, and Microsoft execs have said they have no plans for strict RTO policies unless productivity falls off.

To be fair, Amazon isn’t the only big company taking a harder stance on return to office. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon has been critical of how remote work has created office building vacancies and has told Fortune that remote work harms “spontaneous idea generation” and is bad for team management. And in KPMG’s 2024 CEO Outlook survey, released in September, almost 80% of the 1,300 CEOs polled worldwide said they thought hybrid workers would return to full-time office schedules by 2027.

But even so, would eliminating remote and hybrid work be good for workers and productivity, or a step backward?

In September, PwC released its Workforce Radar Report, a 13-month study that surveyed more than 20,000 chief executives, HR professionals and employees. Its findings? “Hybrid workers have higher degrees of satisfaction and productivity than fully on-site [workers],” a PWC partner and workforce transformation leader, Anthony Abbatiello, summarized to Business Insider in September.

Quoting the PwC report, “The idea that being on-site all day every day is necessary to establish and sustain a strong culture is a myth. Don’t be afraid to offer flexible options for fear of diminishing it.”