Many employees facing strongly worded return-to-office mandates today may suspect that their marching orders are based on little more than the chief executive’s gut instinct. Now employees at Amazon, at least, have had their suspicions confirmed.
Andy Jassy and “60-80 other CEOs”
Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, has been under fire recently, after leaked audio from an internal fireside chat revealed that he has no data backing up his particularly aggressive return-to-office (RTO) mandate. That RTO mandate has roiled Amazon for the past year, drawing petitions from employees that oppose the policy and setting the stage for a round of forced resignations.
In the leaked audio, reported by Business Insider, an employee asks Jassy what data points he has to back up the RTO mandate, and Jassy admits that he has no “perfect data,” but cites conversations with “60-80 other CEOs,” all of whom prefer in-office work to remote work. An Amazon SVP, Mike Hopkins, doubled down, saying of in-office work, “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
Jassy doesn’t specify which chief executives he spoke to, but the demographics of the typical CEO are well-established: male, white, and over 50. (Demographics shared by both Jassy and Hopkins.) It doesn’t take a data scientist to guess which way Jassy’s CEO sample pool might skew: in a partial list of major companies currently mandating RTO, including Meta, Goldman Sachs, and Apple, just one woman CEO is represented, Citigroup’s Jane Fraser.
Remote benefits women. RTO benefits the few.
It’s unsurprising that in-office work is a good fit for extremely wealthy middle-aged men in leadership positions at major companies, a self-selecting group that have likely never seen their ambition or achievement troubled by the friction of a pumping schedule, school pick-ups, elder care, or even simple chores like scheduling yard work or deciding what to make for dinner.
For the people who are responsible for those tasks — mainly women, who still handle at least 65% of unpaid domestic labor, not accounting for mental load — remote work was revolutionary.
As Claire Suddath recently wrote in the Bloomberg Equality newsletter, women were shunted out of the workforce by the millions at the beginning of the pandemic, but quickly regained that ground and then some by 2021 and 2022. What happened?
In the early days of pandemic-driven remote work, when schools and daycares were closed, workforce participation by women 25-54 dropped precipitously, plummeting from 77% to 73.5% between February and May of 2020, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Many lost their jobs, while at least 1.8 million women dropped out of the workforce by choice, often to take on full-time childcare and distance learning. Then, schools and daycare reopened, alleviating the childcare burden while remote work remained in place. By May 2023, participation by women in the workforce reached 77.6%, a historic high.
RTO is already erasing those gains. Motherly’s 2023 State of Motherhood report found that the number of stay-at-home mothers skyrocketed from 2022 to 2023, jumping from 15% to 25% of respondents. And 18% of women said they changed or left a job in the past year, with nearly half citing taking care of children or lack of childcare as their reason. 64% of mothers not working outside of the home said they need flexible work in order to return to the workforce.
Similarly, the latest Women in the Workplace report from McKinsey and LeanIn found that 9 out of 10 women want to work remotely all or part of the time, and noted that 49% of women in leadership roles consider flexibility one of the top considerations for leaving or taking on a role — that trend is even more pronounced in younger women leaders, who are more likely to be caring for young children.
That report also found that the office has little to offer in comparison: all women experience a 10% increase in microaggressions when working in a physical office, and that the uptick is even higher for LGBTQ+ women, women with disabilities, and women of color.
The data is clear, and it doesn’t support RTO
While top CEOs may find data less compelling than gut instinct, it paints a clear picture: women of prime working age — which is also to say, the women most likely to be working mothers — benefit hugely from remote work, which provides the flexibility to achieve great things in their careers while also managing the childcare, elder care, and domestic responsibilities that they still largely shoulder. Similarly, RTO mandates and in-office work in general have real downsides, including inability to return to the workforce, limited options for career mobility, and increased exposure to microaggressions.
Women are hardly the only ones that stand to lose under a widespread embrace of return-to-office. McKinsey found that 87% of workers would seize the opportunity to work remotely if it was offered. Gallup found that exclusively in-office employees are far less engaged than their hybrid and, especially, remote counterparts. Meanwhile, companies with RTO mandates are experiencing spiking levels of attrition and are struggling to recruit, perhaps because flexible work is one the top three factors job seekers take into consideration when evaluating an offer.
Meanwhile, an oft-cited working paper from remote work expert Nick Bloom found that, while some studies of remote work demonstrate a 10% drop in productivity, the most plausible explanations for this drop include lack of mentoring and management, reduced interpersonal connection, and challenges in communicating and setting norms. These are not remote work challenges; these are leadership and culture challenges that have merely been exposed by remote work.
So, when top executives speak disparagingly of remote work, framing it as “morally wrong,” as Elon Musk did, or arguing that, “people who work from home are not as efficient,” as Mark Zuckerberg did, what they’re really saying is that they, as leaders, failed to make remote work effective. The office requires less work, less leadership, less communication, and less care for culture and community. In other words, executives promoting RTO might instinctively “know it’s better.” The question is: for whom?
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