Almost five years after the COVID-19 pandemic normalized remote work, many employees are continuing to push back against their bosses’ attempt to pull them in the office five days a week. As companies like Amazon begin demanding fully in-person work, employees who still have the semblance of hybrid or flexible work are seemingly clinging onto it more than ever.
So finds WFH Research, a research group led by Stanford professors Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis, and Shelby Buckman, in its latest report. Surveying attitudes towards remote work since the spike in working from home during the lockdown (May 2020), the authors find that the office tug of war between bosses and employees is far from over. In fact, it appears workers are becoming even less amenable to RTO compared to a couple of years ago.
By the end of 2024, just 44% of respondents said they’d comply if faced with a five-day return to office mandate. Others (41%) would rather look for a new job or quit (14%). In 2022, more than half of the workforce (almost 53%) said they’d adhere to a fully in-person mandate. Meanwhile, slightly less people reported that they would search for a new job (32.8%) and the number of those who said they’d quit remained steady (14%).
That’s all to say, employees are more likely to look for different career opportunities when pushed into the office. “It seems that RTO resistance is growing,” one of the study’s authors, Stanford economist Nick Bloom wrote on LinkedIn.
The rise in people saying they'd quit also might be an indicator of the holdouts from the office. "The folks that are fine to return to the office have been heading back in," Bloom told Fortune. "Those that are left are increasingly resistant. They will be people who live a long way from the office and can’t move or can’t easily commute," he said, pointing out that this group's situation becomes more presing as the mandates become more intense like in the case of Amazon, Dell and Salesforce.
View this interactive chart on Fortune.com
Talent flees for competitors
In the early 2020s the push and pull between employers and employees was referred to in military or chess-like Machevillian terms; referenced as a battle, war, and even truce or stale-mate in the latter years. At one point it seemed like workers were losing their upper-hand, resigning to companies bullish on mandates as they navigated a tight job market.
But it seems as if we’ve just entered a new phase of the conflict— employees simply leaving the battle ground all together. A separate case study conducted by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan found as much, noting that RTO mandates lead to a talent drain. Looking specifically at tech companies (including Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX), they found that said policies are followed by an increase in departures from senior leaders, specifically to “direct competitors.” Flexible working arrangements have become an important tool in recruiting, with remote and hybrid companies receiving more job applications.
Indeed, after receiving another push for in-person work this past September, Amazon workers also threatened to leave.
“My months of struggling to make three days a week are over, and I know that my time at Amazon has to end,” Laura, a working mom who has been a remote employee at Amazon the last four years told Fortune. “Honestly, I’ve lost so much trust in Amazon leadership at this point,” she said, adding that she was “rage-applying to new jobs.” Of course, that could be what the company wants, as some experts note that such RTO mandates are a covert way of issuing layoffs.
Though not all staffers have the leverage to act on their desire to leave. “Very few people vote with their feet,” Laszlo Bock, consultant and former Google senior executive, told Fortune. Noting that this style of leadership marks “a triumph of traditional management over innovative management,” he adds that the latter style requires more resources and data and therefore companies revert to past ways.
Another potential driver for this increase in resistance towards fully in-person policies is that "hybrid has become the new norm," Mark (Shuai) Ma, associate professor of Business Administration at the University of Pittsburgh told Fortune. Big corporations might be pushing five days in office but "most firms are offering flexibility," Ma notes, adding that not many companies have followed Amazon's suit just yet.
“Employees are getting bolder in refusing to return to the office,” wrote Bloom. He added that another potential reason for this rise in RTO pushback is that we’ve reached the core of the resistance, the intensely pro-WFH workers that have held out on the office for so long. “Another explanation is the employees that were fine going back to the office have already done so. The folks that are left are the hard-core resisters [sic].”
Either way, workers who are fully remote have less symptoms of burnout, specifically less prone to report having low energy, than their hybrid or in-person counterparts— per WFH’s research. And both hybrid and fully remote employees are less likely to express that they have negative feelings towards their job. Preferences remain, more or less, clear.
“It's not just resistance for the purpose of feeling a lack of trust, for some it's resistance over nearly impossible life choices: my career, or my family,” Brian Elliott, CEO at Work Forward told Fortune. The companies back in 2022 likely always intended and said they'd go back to the office, he notes. But in 2024, RTO mandates are characterized by a swinging of the pendulum or walking back on previously remote policies. By then, some workers have already habituated and settled down far from the office. "When they changed their minds and policies twice, that impacts and upends people's lives more dramatically," he says of companies like Dell and Amazon.
But Amazon and other big corporations still push for said policies, despite knowing that it might lead to turnover. “Is this good news to Amazon and others using a 5-day RTO to reduce headcount,” Bloom mused, regarding his latest data. “On the one hand yes - it means they will get more employees quitting, helping their headcount reduction. On the other hand no - the data shows the folks most like[ly] to quit are senior and high performing, damaging profitability.”
