Examining the WFH Backlash: Is a Return to the Office Inevitable?
“In-person settings can encourage ad-hoc collaborations and help maintain a vibrant company culture. However, research and successful case studies have shown that innovation and productivity are achievable in remote or hybrid settings as well, with the right tools and culture in place.”
Nida Mehtab Gillio, Founder and CEO of Caryatid (Workplace Consultancy)
In September 2024, Amazon’s CEO announced that all its corporate employees would be back in the office five days a week starting in 2025.
Like many companies, Amazon had allowed its corporate employees to work from home throughout the pandemic, before transitioning to a hybrid, three-day-a-week in-office model in 2023. And even though the pandemic has receded, the WFH trend, so far, has not: US office occupancy remains below pre-pandemic levels.
While Amazon’s not the first company to end its WFH experiment, it is the biggest, and its actions could inspire others. The idea has been brewing: the most recent KPMG US CEO Outlook Survey, released in September 2024, found that nearly 80 percent of CEOs believe corporate employees will be back in the office full time within three years, when only 34 percent said so in April of the same year (KPMG 2024).
Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, cited “culture, collaboration, and learning” as chief reasons for the move. Whether those variables demonstrably improve at Amazon in 2025—and at what cost—could determine whether a countertrend of returning to the office prevails.
Analyzing Amazon’s Move
Amazon’s move is disruptive, divisive, and countertrend. Only 7 percent of large tech companies require employees to be in the office five days a week, compared with 33 percent for all US companies, according to Flex Index, a software firm that tracks return-to-office efforts. Some people have even posited that Amazon’s strategy is a quiet way of laying off part of its workforce (WSJ 2024).
But it might be laying off the wrong part of the workforce, says Nick Bloom, a professor of economics at Stanford University, as the employees who leave will largely be those who have the most options, and therefore the most talented and desirable employees. Others likely to exit are mid-career professionals with young families, who will take their experience with them. Indeed, an increase in quit rates is the most likely outcome: Grindr lost nearly half its workforce bringing people back into the office in August (WSJ 2024)
Bloom further notes that a study tracking a move in the opposite direction—from five days a week in-office to a hybrid three-days-a-week model—resulted in a 33 percent decrease in quit rates (Nature 2024). This could mean Amazon’s move results in an increase in quit rates of roughly the same size. But if Amazon’s goal is to quietly lay off part of its workforce, so what?
Reconfiguring the Value Equation
It’s more productive to explore how in-office work, at-home work, and hybrid work compare in terms of value for companies and employees, as this is the equation everyone will soon be solving for—if they aren’t already.
“I’m a big proponent of balancing the business and employee equation,” says Nida Mehtab Gillio, founder and CEO of Caryatid, a workplace consultancy. “This is a time when we can’t afford to be polarized. So how do we really understand the drivers from both sides, and create a win-win for both?”
Sometimes, value is easy to measure: on average, Americans say the option to work from home two or three days a week is worth an 8 percent difference in pay (Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes 2023). The option to work from home any number of days per week has contributed to a marked rise in the number of women in the workforce. For the individual, flexibility, work-life balance, and reduced commute are all immediate benefits when working from home. The removal of those benefits would also be immediately felt in a return to the office, which is part of why working from home remains resoundingly favored by employees and middle managers.
Outcomes like productivity are slightly harder to measure, and studies can be more mixed, but the aggregated results do suggest that hybrid working from home improves worker retention without damaging performance (Nature 2024). But sometimes value is extremely tricky to quantify: how does one ensure that ‘culture, collaboration, and learning’ have improved?
The Benefits of In-Office Work
“While organizations will keep trying to push for full return to office, it will only be successful if it is demonstrated in a measured way that the organizational areas of importance are suffering due to work from home—and ensures that time in the office will be programmed and will indeed solve for that,” Nida says.
Companies are made of individuals but operate on collective organizational goals. Sometimes, those collective goals may be served better by a return to the office. Coincidence, collision, proximity, and ease of communication—which all increase with a shared work environment—can contribute to breakthroughs, large and small, that make an organization more innovative.
Innovation is hard to measure, but it’s not impossible: a study of patent applications over the last half century found that teams located in the same city versus those based several hundreds of miles apart were 22 percent more likely to produce innovative patents and that those in-person teams were 27 percent more likely to produce pioneering insights in scientific papers (Nature 2023).
“In-person settings can encourage ad-hoc collaborations and help maintain a vibrant company culture,” Nida says. “However, research and successful case studies have shown that innovation and productivity are achievable in remote or hybrid settings as well, with the right tools and culture in place.”
Towards the Hybrid Future
For some businesses—especially large, publicly traded ones like Amazon—the question of in-office versus WFH can come down to a bottom line. A loosening labor market may shift more power to office-preferring CEOs, as employees find themselves with fewer opportunities elsewhere. Indeed, WFH rates tend to be higher in states with tighter labor markets (MIT 2024).
But fears of a full-blown return to the office are overblown, Bloom thinks. So far, the companies that have returned to full-time, in-office work have been outliers drawing outsized attention. Meanwhile, the number of companies requiring full-time, in-office work has actually fallen by around 15 percent from a year ago, according to data from Flex Index. The future, for many, remains hybrid: not a binary choice between home and office, but a spectrum between them, with differentiated tasks and incentives and configurations that match.
Nida sees the current split of in-person and remote work in hybrid setups skewing more heavily in favor of remote work as organizations become more digital-first and less human-dependent due to AI-augmented workflows. With a shift towards a more gig-centric economy, distributed workforces and hybrid setups will likely be the new normal going forward. Offices or other spaces to gather employees will still exist, Nida predicts, but in the form of collaboration hubs that focus on experience-driven design that boost innovation.
“Given the growing employee demand for flexibility, hybrid models are likely to dominate the future of work, though some industries may still push for more in-office presence,” Nida says.
Further shifts in technology, culture, and policy will drive how the future of work evolves from here. But it will also be carved out by dialogue between employees and organizations, an ongoing negotiation between the needs of the individual and the goals of the collective.
“How we move our economy and society forward is everyone’s problem,” Nida says. “It’s not just an employer problem. It’s not just an employee problem. So coming together to the table for continuous learning and refinement is the attitude that I would love for leaders, practitioners, employees, and employers to keep at the front of their mind.”
