Executives at major companies are referencing a specific term to hedge when asked by employees if they plan to follow in Amazon's footsteps and implement a return to 5 days a week in the office.
That word? Productivity.
While Amazon has been the most high-profile example this year of a full return to office policy, set to go into effect in January, telecom giant AT&T has also elected to double down on in-person work with a similar 5-day policy, Business Insider first reported.
In the wake of Amazon's announcement, executives at both Google and Microsoft, which require employees to be in the office at least 3 days a week, have fielded questions from staff wondering if the days of hybrid work are numbered.
Microsoft's executive vice president of cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, said the company wouldn't change the hybrid work policy unless it noticed a drop in productivity, BI reported in September.
In October, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the company had no plans to order employees back to the office, so long as employees remain productive during their at-home work days, BI previously reported.
Over at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg said last year that "early analysis of performance data," indicated productivity increases for early-career engineers in the office at least 3 days a week. A few months later, the company announced it was requiring employees to return to the office 3 days a week.
Executives at Dell called the company's sales team back to the office 5 days a week starting at the end of September, writing in a memo, "Our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite."
Though Amazon did not explicitly name productivity as a reason for its full return to the office, CEO Andy Jassy emphasized a similar term: effectiveness.
Being back in person 5 days a week makes it "easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another," he wrote at the time.
For those committing to a full return to office, preparing campuses for the influx of employees in the new year is its own challenge. Amazon has since delayed the announced January 2 effective date of the new mandate for some employees because it doesn't have enough office space in some locations, BI reported earlier this month.
As CEOs and company leaders keep an eye on how employees in remote or hybrid setups perform, various studies since the onset of the pandemic have attempted to measure and compare the productivity of employees who work at home and in-office. Research studies have produced conflicting results, further complicated by the matter of how best to define or measure productivity.
Goldman Sachs, which has a 5-day-in-office policy, reviewed several analyses that used different ways of evaluating changes in work-from-home productivity, from call-center workers who were randomly chosen to work from home to comparing the productivity of randomly assigned remote workers with their in-office peers.
In short, it's hard to say for sure, and executives are deciding what their long-term setup will be after a year in which some of the world's biggest companies put a renewed focus on being "lean" and "efficient."
Meanwhile, some employees have returned to commuting in (sometimes "coffee-badging" in and returning home), others have relocated to comply with a policy change, and some have resigned to pursue a hybrid or fully remote opportunity. As companies tighten their belts and conduct layoffs, other workers have taken to workplace forums to wonder if some of the RTO mandates have been a possible "quiet layoffs" tactic.
As more major global companies revisit their policies and make changes, CEOs are likely to face more questions on the topic going into the new year.
For some, the answer is simple: Stay productive and we'll stay flexible.
