In September 2024, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s CEO, announced a return-to-office mandate that would require the firm’s office staff to be on-site five days per week. Although Amazon’s employees reportedly began ‘rage applying’ for other jobs, and a petition protesting the decision gathered signatures from 30,000 staff, many commentators predicted the initiative would inspire a wide-scale shift back to in-office working. Eight months on, that prediction has yet to come true.
Among tech teams, strict office-return mandates are rare. The majority of software developers work remotely at least part of the time, according to a survey by Stack Overflow, a developer hub. Plus, only one in five software engineers expect to return to the office full time by 2026, according to ScienceSoft, an IT consulting firm.
And most companies do not plan to issue full-time RTO mandates in the near term, according to recent research from Hays, a recruitment firm. Only 8% of employers surveyed expected to plough ahead with full-time in-office working. That’s perhaps because almost half of the employees surveyed said they’d consider quitting if their company mandated a full-time office return.
“Based on the data we see, employers in the tech sector still have a balanced view of flexible working and an understanding of how to attract employees,” says Amanda Whicher, the director of technology at Hays UK and Ireland. “Quite often we see global organisations making these decisions but it doesn’t necessarily mean that every organisation will follow suit.”
RTO brain drain
Companies that do implement RTO mandates risk losing their best talent, according to a recent academic paper, Return-to-Office Mandates and Brain Drain, by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh, Baylor University, the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business.
The researchers studied millions of LinkedIn users working at S&P 500 companies and found that the introduction of RTO mandates negatively impacted talent retention across all roles, even if the policy did not require a full five days of office attendance.
Brain drain is a consequence of RTO mandates, even at the world’s largest firms. The researchers found that most staff who left their roles were senior employees, skilled workers or women, which suggests a link between DEI and the availability of hybrid or remote roles. A separate study found that many employees from major tech firms, including Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX, left following RTO mandates.
Meanwhile, plenty of disgruntled employees have suggested in online posts that full-time RTO mandates are a roundabout way for employers to create a hostile environment and encourage staff to leave. There may be merit to such accusations. In a 2024 study, a quarter of bosses conceded that they hoped their RTO mandates would push employees to leave on their own.
Whatever the reason for the enactment of strict return policies, RTO mandates appear to be a major about-face. Consider the now-deleted Dell blog post from 2016, which seemed to promote remote work, or Michael Dell’s criticism of RTO mandates in 2022.
Software companies leave RTO at home
Some companies have long embraced fully remote work. GitLab, for example, has been completely remote since its founding in 2011. Stack Overflow operated a hybrid model when it was founded in 2008, but went fully remote in 2023.
Debbie Shotwell, the chief people officer at Stack Overflow, says rigid office-return policies can “decrease job satisfaction, increase stress and impact productivity and morale. They are often driven more by office-lease agreements than by culture or productivity.”
She adds that flexibility is one of the tech industry’s workplace differentiators. It rarely matters where software engineers, for instance, are physically located. And, says Shotwell, a distributed, remote model not only provides flexibility in day-to-day operations, but also enables companies to tap into a larger talent pool.
Twilio, a cloud-software company, introduced a remote-first policy called Open Work toward the end of the Covid pandemic. The company’s CEO, Khozema Shipchandler, has repeatedly stated that staff will not return to the office while he is in the top post. According to Twilio’s staff surveys, the firm’s remote-working policy factored heavily into the decisions of many current employees to work at the company.
Christy Lake, Twilio’s chief administrative offer, says the firm has instead doubled down on its Open Work policy, providing plenty of resources designed to help employees thrive in a remote-working environment. “A remote-first model built on listening, adaptability and connection can lead to strong engagement, high retention and an employee base that aligned around impact,” she says.
Staff ‘aren’t very interested’ in office returns
Like Twilio, most businesses had not experimented with fully remote working until the Covid pandemic. Manuel Albuquerque, CEO at Primetag, a marketing-software firm, recalls the decision to go fully remote: “I thought we had an amazing office, with an amazing atmosphere. Then Covid hit and everyone went home.”
Once lockdowns were lifted, Albuquerque thought everyone would want to return to the office as normal. But Primetag’s employees were enjoying were working remotely and its workforce had become highly dispersed, he explains. “So when I said, ‘Let’s go back to the office,’ they said, ‘Well, we’re not very interested in that,’” Albuquerque says. In a web series about Primetag’s decision to go fully remote, one employee claims to have shed a tear when she heard the company was considering a return to in-office working.
Instead of forcing employees back to the office, Primetag introduced a so-called ‘nomadic office’, meaning that employees, along with their families, are invited to a location for one month each year to interact with their colleagues. Albuquerque says this has helped employees form bonds with one another while also providing useful in-person check-ins.
“I love being around people – I’m a salesperson,” Albuquerque says. “But that doesn’t mean others are the same. Pushing them to be like me is unproductive and creates a clash.”
No one-size-fits-all approach
Of course, different companies have different organisational and workplace requirements. “What’s right for an Amazon is not going to be right for another organisation,” says Whicher.
But, for tech workers, there is often no need to be on-site. This is good news for tech firms because it means they have a wider pool of candidates to draw from and therefore are more likely to find the person whose skills best fulfil the organisation’s needs. The same can be said for employers located away from major population centres.
Albuquerque adds that for engineers hybrid or full-time office work can even pose a logistical challenge. “Software engineers have their workstations set up; they have their software and their plug-ins,” he explains. “When you take them out of that environment, they often have to build their workstation again. Yes, they want to meet each other, and they have social needs, but, a lot of the time, they’d prefer to be focused 100% on their work, in their work environment and workspace – and that’s usually their homes.”
Businesses should think more granularly about the needs of their employees. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach for organisations or for workers, but taking a little time to think about what employees want and what they need to perform at the highest level will make them feel appreciated and listened to while also boosting the bottom line.
In September 2024, Andy Jassy, Amazon's CEO, announced a return-to-office mandate that would require the firm's office staff to be on-site five days per week. Although Amazon's employees reportedly began ‘rage applying’ for other jobs, and a petition protesting the decision gathered signatures from 30,000 staff, many commentators predicted the initiative would inspire a wide-scale shift back to in-office working. Eight months on, that prediction has yet to come true.
Among tech teams, strict office-return mandates are rare. The majority of software developers work remotely at least part of the time, according to a survey by Stack Overflow, a developer hub. Plus, only one in five software engineers expect to return to the office full time by 2026, according to ScienceSoft, an IT consulting firm.
And most companies do not plan to issue full-time RTO mandates in the near term, according to recent research from Hays, a recruitment firm. Only 8% of employers surveyed expected to plough ahead with full-time in-office working. That's perhaps because almost half of the employees surveyed said they’d consider quitting if their company mandated a full-time office return.
