Amazon’s chief executive, Andy Jassy, made waves last month when he demanded that all employees return to the office five days a week.
The proclamation seemed to validate similar demands made by executives including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon and Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon. And it naturally raised the question of whether others might follow suit. (It appears some have.)
But it also flew in the face of researchers and their studies that have found hybrid work benefits companies.
Stanford University economics professor Nick Bloom, for example, has found that employees who work two days a week at home are just as productive and less likely to quit.
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Bloom, like others, speculated that Amazon’s pronouncement was really an attempt to reduce the workforce without official lay-offs. An Amazon spokesperson said the policy is “an effort to strengthen our culture and ensure our teams are connected. She added that the company has no plans for the decision to reduce overall headcount.
So why do so many employers that say they’re data-driven seem to move counter to science?
[ Big disconnect between employers and staff on hybrid work, report findsOpens in new window ]
Executives are not convinced by the research
“It’s not like: ‘Aspirin definitely helps with headaches. It’s been proven again and again and again,’” Laszlo Bock, a former senior vice-president for people operations at Google, said. “The academic studies that have been done, and there are not that many, show a range of outcomes – and they generally show a kind of neutral to slightly positive.”
Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, said he disagreed, pointing to a meta-analysis of 108 studies.
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Some are just over it
Almost five years since the start of the pandemic, many chief executive officers are ready to move on from an experiment they never wanted to start. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Mr Jassy wrote in a memo about ending remote work at Amazon.
Grant said that chief executives may not always methodically control for whether an effect was caused by remote work, the pandemic or something else – as an academic researcher would. They also may not want to find out that hybrid work is better.
“Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said.
They see their company as different
Many of the executives who have called employees back to the office point to the particularities of their business or industry that require in-person work.
That includes Jassy. “Our culture is unique,” he wrote in the memo.
This predisposition to dismiss outside data is common. “When we replicated studies in different industries, in different organisations, the patterns look pretty similar,” Grant said. “And when I talk to CEOs, they all have the same struggles and challenges regardless of an industry.”
[ Majority of employers won’t change hybrid working policies in 2024Opens in new window ]
It’s not practical
Hybrid work may be technically the best route, but it’s also complicated to oversee. Time is money, and CEOs may not want to spend theirs deliberating over a decision about bringing workers back – or figuring out how to manage a hybrid workplace.
But that, Grant argues, may be missing the point. “There’s a premium on decisiveness in the business world,” he said. But “if you’re making a highly consequential, irreversible decision, you are supposed to slow down as much as possible”. – This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
