Another previous post from LinkedIn, archived here. This originally was posted to LinkedIn on July 21, 2025.

To be clear, I’m not saying Amazon’s RTO mandate was a bad decision. I’m saying they never showed anyone why it was a good one.

I’ve often said Amazon is a data-driven, evidence-based company. We collect information objectively, discuss it, test it, verify it, and then the data will tell us the right thing to do. We make two-way door decisions quickly, but are diligent when making one-way door decisions.

RTO was a one-way door. Once you tell people “come back or you’re fired,” you can’t really take it back.

Therefore, I expected Amazon to back up their decision with evidence. But when AWS CEO Matt Garman said, “nine out of 10 Amazon employees he’d spoken with were ‘actually quite excited by this change,’” or “when we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in person,” he didn’t provide any data to back it up. (Unless “nine out of ten people he’d spoken with” has a p-value under .05? Probably not.) And then Andy Jassy, in his RTO announcement, said “the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” without providing any actual evidence. These showed that the decision was more important to them than the data.

But then there’s Gartner Research [https://www.gartner.com/en/articles/the-data-is-in-return-to-office-mandates-aren-t-worth-the-talent-risks], who showed that RTO mandates didn’t improve performance. And for some people, in-person work stifles productivity. Or people reported higher feelings of inclusion in a remote work environment. Or that managers saw the greatest benefits from RTO mandates.

Wait… managers saw the most benefit? Like in the study by Ding and Ma in December 2023 [https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401, https://www.businessinsider.com/rto-policies-dont-improve-employee-performance-company-value-controlling-bosses-2024-1], that observed: “[r]esults of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.”? And based on their data, they could “report significant declines in employees’ job satisfactions mandates but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after RTO mandates”?

Wait. “[N]o significant changes in […] firm values after RTO mandates.” Firm values, like, Leadership Principles? So there’s data saying we’re not better at invent & simplify if we’re in the office?

So on the one hand, we have Amazon executives insisting that “our culture” is about working in an office, and that we’re not innovating if we’re not in the office, and that there are “significant advantages” to being in the office, because …REASONS. And on the other hand, there are research papers with observable, measurable, verifiable data that says … not that?

Again, I’m not saying RTO is a bad decision. I’m just saying that Amazon never showed any evidence of evidence-based decision making while making it.