Return-to-office mandates are more than "backdoor layoffs"
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Hello, welcome to decoder. I me like patel, editor in chief of the verge, and decoder is my show. But big ideas, another props.

Today, we're talking about work, specifically where we work, how our expectations of working remotely were radially changed by the pandemic and how those expections feel like they're on the verge of changing yet again. For many people, the pendula has strong wildly between working fully remote and now pushed to return to office from their bosses. And there are a lot of theories about what might be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back here in.

The coder i've taught to you lots of sea is about the benefits of working fully remote versus hybrid or having a run back in the office over the past several years. And i've heard the full spectrum of responses some executives are adamant that people need to be in the and others are equally element that fully remote is the way to go. We'll place some of those answers for you in the episodes.

You can get a sense of the enormous range opinions here. If you look at the surveys, it's basically fifty, fifty. Quite a lot of people want to work remotely and they can be pretty loud online.

But there are a lot of people who are often quieter who want to go back to the office for pretty good reasons. Some folks just don't have this space to work home, or they are simply tired of making video calls and sweat pencil day and never really leaving the house. I know some people who really like being able to just leave work at the office when they had home from the day.

And I heard from a lot of unger, people who are struggling to, at face time, with the more senior and experiences people of their companies in order to build relationships and grow networks. The messy middle of this is what quite a few companies have settled on, hybrid work, which allows some people to be the office, what others work remotely. This can work.

This is how the verge runs. And I quite like IT, but it's not perfect. Like so many people who work in a hybrid environment. There are days where I go into a mostly eti office and and sit on a video in the, there are days where I realized i'm the only one at home because everyone else has gone into the office. Figuring out how to make hybrid work is a long term cultural project that we only really started in twenty twenty.

And while there are some obvious benefits, it's not clear if anyone's really correct IT in a way that scales across different kinds of companies. And now some companies have decided that the effort just isn't worth IT. In september, amazon minded that all employees have to return to the office for five days a week starting in january.

In the memo announcing the change, CEO andy Jessie argued that the company had observed that is easier to learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture that collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are simpler er and more effective and the teams tend to be Better connected to one another when everyone was in the office. And amazon isn't alone, wanting employees back at their desks. Companies like disney and salesforce have made similar arguments in pushing for employees to come back to the office for least four days a week.

Apple has been steadily pressuring people to come back to office for a while now that for spaceship office in cupertino, asn't built to stay empty. But is the return office really about building company culture and being more creative and productive as to tell you that there is a huge chunk of the verge in decoder audience that is absolutely convinced that any return to office announcement is actually just to lay off and disguise we get emails and comments making this case every time one of these moves is announced. Jessie even address this directly just a few days ago, and in all hands, reading, responding to claims that the return to work Mandate is A T back door laff, he told employees that that is simply not true looking back to that then.

So I wanted to what's going on and what the real reasons behind return to office might be then honestly, where this is all going next, to explain that. I caught up with two experts on the subject stuff, minor professor, business strategy at column, a business school and just a rego, the chief strategy officer at workplace, cultural consultancy, culture partners. We dove into what's been happening to the nature of work today, and you'll hear both of them layouts from the key reasons behind the return to office push.

We also tried to figure out if amazon is just an outlier or as you'll hear, just to say, the tip of the spear and what could be something much bigger. Okay, return to office. And it's really all about here. you.

Let's surprizing out for a bit. The pandemic dramatically changed office culture. In the begin twenty twenty.

We put our laptops in the stack of books. We ought the largest web camp at least. We tried to buy a largest and web cam, and we adjust IT.

IT was hard. IT was not even really that long ago here at the verge, we went full remote. And apart from a few years that sometimes go into our new york office, we haven't really gone back. But fast forward a few years after the pandemic lock dance lifted in, a lot of companies were really yearning for return to Normal. In quick succession.

Apple, google, meta in microsoft all announced the employees had to stop moving around, settle in a big city with a local office and be at their desks for something like three days a week, with a lot of flexibility and exceptions. And all along, amazon has been moving towards a full return to office. The company had a flexible policy to put in place in twenty twenty one, where managers could mostly decide how and under what circumstances teams could work remotely.

But in twenty twenty three, the company on hybrid requiring people to come in three days a week. And now in twenty twenty four, amazon is back at five days week in the office. But how is all of this played out across the workforce? Both Stephen and jusici told me that remote work, which made up about five percent of how U.

S. Employees spent their workdays before the pandemic jump ed to nearly seventy percent in two and twenty since that peak. However, IT has been dropping fast in its platov. Now that hybrid has become the norm. Jessica.

I think thirty percent of people were working in some hybrid environment last year and we in platov in that return to office trend postcode. But now that plateau is certain to move again. So amazon is the tip of the sphere and other organizations are following.

So I I really think this is gonna. The twenty twenty five workplace trend is getting everyone back in the office. And it's it's not just back in the office.

It's back in the office full time. It's five days a week. It's sitting in a sign seats.

And the problem that I see with that is that you've got people who are being forced to commute, forced to sit an uncomfortable cloth in a cubicle and deal with the cafeteria of food. Whatever IT is when they have, they've enjoys a different way. For the last few years.

when I had to stuffin, he was also pretty unconvinced that this is going to pan out well for employers. And he agreed that amazon's Mandate does seem to be a major valley in something he's calling the war for the return to office.

I don't think IT actually the numbers changed up much, but somehow the retorted dead is this, as I sometimes call like this war for return to the office, which on one hand, leaders were like some, for whatever reason, want like people back.

And a lot of employees who don't want to go back, and definitely not five days a week, are the executives winning on that front? I personally don't think they will in the end because hybrid is, in my view, the future. And if done right, IT will be successful.

But why do we have to go back to the office? That question, in turns out, is pretty complicated because there are the stated reasons what are companies put in a press release and there are what you might call the implicit reasons the kind of conventional was done, we all think is true those over up quite a bit and sometimes pretty obvious ways. We've heard them before.

The claim is always we are, quote, losing our culture, which I don't even know what that me this is a culture expert. I have no idea what losing a culture is or how that would manifest because it's a total make believe cliche. I idea that is an excuse, right? What I think they mean is we don't have to manage people remotely. And so therefore, we're just going na go back into the office because he was easier that way. But they're saying they're losing their culture. They're saying that they need to be more collaborative and they need to create the moments of impact where people run into each other in the hallway at the water cooler, where they can sit in a break room and collaborate about an idea, they can stand in front of a White board and doodle things on the wall and and be more creative and as a result, be Better at their jobs. That's what they're saying, that people will be Better at their jobs if they come into the office five days a week are.

So those are a sanity's reasons. The things are going to press releases. The big company is in, bosses will put their names on but according to a Jessica and Stephen, while the productivity and cultural angles are enough excuses return to office man, it's are often about something few with any employers would ever really say out loud. control.

You've been on a good sports team that has like the energy. I can really move mountains and you can achieve like really amazing stuff. So there is some good reasons to be back in the office at least some days.

Sometimes the team has to be back and we have to have face to face interaction. And certain tasks are gonna be Better done if we are actually sitting together in in a room. But there are a terrible reasons to bring people back. Leaders might have the illusion that they can control their employees Better when they're in the office because they somehow think if with the buttons are in the chair in the office, then they're working harder than IT at home.

I think one of the real reasons that people wanted go back into the office is because they're totally lost on how to drive results in a hybrid environment. They cannot figure out how to stop tracking activity and start tracking outcomes. And performance managed to outcomes, which is great leadership and harder leadership.

Instead, they are so used to keeping their rebels on people and making sure people are doing their work and asking them, you know, if I am the head of sales, what i'm doing is i'm saying, how many calls did you make? Did you make the calls? Did you put the calls and sales force, did you get the A I bought to listen to your calls to give us some ideas, but higher calls could be Better.

That's what most leaders do is they're just managing activity and it's lazy leadership and it's not elevated leadership and doesn't work. But it's really much easy to do in person than IT is in a hybrid environment. If you were managing to outcomes, you would know that it's just as easy to manage in a virtual environment as IT is in in person environment, but it's harder to do.

so. I think one is management doesn't have the skills to lead virtual environment. And so executives are seeing that their managers are fAiling and they are forcing people back into the office because they don't know how to get their managers to be Better.

I think a second reason is a lack of trust. They just think that people are quotes stealing the company's time by doing laundry ry and going to their soccer game in seta. And it's a mindset issue in which you think that their time is belongs to you and that if they're doing anything other than focusing on productivity in that moment, that therefore they're being unethical, which is more silliness. And then you have kind of the the meta reason, which is I as a leader, wanna have control and command and control is where I have more power, I have more influence and and I have the ability to make this decision, and i'm going to command people back into the office. And so and why not so what companies .

are actually leading the charge here, amazon on as the obviously, of course, it's one of the biggest employers in the country and that has huge workforce of fully min and delivery workers who have been back at work and warehouses in delivery events for years now. They simply can't do their jobs from home. But according to Jessica, it's more about leverage, whether the company believes are enough people out there that want to work there more than they prioritize the flexibility of being remote.

I think it's a company that has a brand that is attractive. Any company. So high tech firms, disney, for example, is attractive. People want to work there.

And so they have the ability to say we're going to make IT hard for you, and we don't care because we know that behind you are a hundred other candidates who would like to have your job. So there's all the real reasons that underlie the spoken reasons that people are saying this. But if you have a good brand, you can get away with that. And so they are now some .

of this can feel like it's limited to the tech industry or a specific set of what you might call laptop jobs. There are tons of people out there who simply have no choice but to be at work in retail and restaurants and entertainment. And a lot of people with White call our jobs.

We ve been backing office since well before hybrid was a thing. Doctors have to be in the office after all. And big law firms and companies in the finance industry long ago told their teams they get paid a lot of money and they need to be in the office five days week because that's how was gona be. The tech companies are locked into ferocious battles for talented people who can pick up and leave at a moment's notice to go walk down the street for someone else for just as much, if not more.

Money tech has historically been known as the cool kids, and they have the glass offices with the pingpong tables to compute in the break room, the volleyball courts outside to bring your dog to work day, and all those other great perks that google made popular thirty years ago now, right, all the other tech firms followed suit because they had to be cool and edgy in order to attract talent.

When there was the fight for tech talent, silicon valley and elsewhere, well, law firms, smaller organizations, those firms aren't trying to get people back in the office because our officers are so cool. And we need to be more collaborative and creative like we used to be. They're just saying people aren't being as productive.

We need people back in the office because they need to get back to work. People are doing laundry and they are going to coffee shops and they're not being as productive. So the reason i'm noticing behind closed doors is different.

We have think a quick break will be back.

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We're back with professor Steve mawyer in workplace culture experts, just a rigger discussing return to office Mandate before the break. You heard a few of the stated reasons why some big campaigns are pushing so hard to bring people back to the office. It's about productivity, it's about preserving culture, and it's probably also quite a bit about control.

And i've heard all of this when talking to CEO on decoder. A lot of them seem to agree that flexibility around remote work was key for the first couple of years. The pandemic and while adJusting was difficult, IT was doable.

We made IT work, but some exacts. Just don't think it's a great long term strategy, not for the business and not for the culture. For example, we recently had duo lingo CEO Louis fan on on the show and he explained the dual lingo, which is headquarter in pittsburgh, has workers back at the office three days a week without exceptions.

I just who hardly believe that you can work Better that way. And most of what we do, not a hundred percent, but most of what we do is creative stuff. It's just a lot harder to do so over over slack and zoom.

You know that kind of worked out for about nine months during the premium IT is actually impressive. How you know when when the pandemic started will had to go remote. We executed pretty well towards the end of IT.

Our ideas have gna run out. I mean, we were executing the ideas, but we going to have run out of new ideas. And we so as we came back to the office within three months, you would just see, like all these idea are popping up.

And it's because, my god, first of you can sit in front of a White board and talk about stuff also. You know, we have lunch together here everyday. In the lunch line, you hear people being, hey, I mean, seeing a while, I thought of saying this to you.

It's just something that you would never send a slack for. I think the combination of all this just makes IT, makes you a Better company adds. I don't have that much proof, but I am extremely convinced of this.

That line about creative work is something we've heard from other big names, the industry disney CEO bob ager used at last year when he said, quote, in a creative business like hours, nothing can replace the ability to connect, observe and create with peers that comes from being physically together. snore. The opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors.

Disney is now back in office four days a week, but some ceos don't buy IT, and they are equally candid about IT. Earlier this year, I chat with zoom CEO archon. Zoom was obviously one of the big winners. And the shift to remote during the pandemic, this business basically exploded overnight from ten million users of the other two thousand and nineteen, more than three hundred million just four months later that zoom is the company eventually went hybrid. Two, here's what eric had to say about return to office and how company should focus instead on Fostering connection among employees with all sites and other team building exercises, which I goes a lot of what I heard from .

Stephen adjuster. I do not think of people. They wanted to get more often Better, but they wanted to occasionally get guess IT together, in particular, for new employees. They want to start with in person interaction. And after words you and I know already know each other very well for the future interactions, we can go online, right? Also, they want to e first time we we met in person, the future conversation, we will go online. I also also want to meet in person maybe once or twice a year because we have a so many employee live in area, you know and also in right, they also want to get there to get the once or twice a year. I think that's good enough.

One conversation i've been taking about a lot in this context is when I had in twenty twenty with google CEO. Soon there will try, right, is the pandemic was in full swing at the time, google was fully remote. And soon there made a similar argument about creative work like brainstorming and how important might be for google to reconsider its approach to mote online when the roadmaps were less clear.

Relativity is down in certain parts. And what is not clear to me is um in the first two months, most of the people are already on projects in which they kind of know what they need to do. But you know the next space which will kick in is where, let's say, you're designing next to us products and you know you're in a brainstorming phase, things they're more unstructured.

How does that collaboration actually work? You know, that's a bit hard to understand and and do. So we are trying to understand what works well and what doesn't here in twenty .

twenty four IT seems like google thinking about that dynamic more than ever. According to a report from business insider, when employees asked about the amazon return to office Mandate at a recent all hands meeting, google VP of global compensation and benefits, john casey said hybrid wasn't going anywhere for now, and soon himself tried to undermine employees to be productive on the days they were working from home.

The implication, of course, says that google has the power to take away hybrid in remote flexibility if he wants to, right? So that's what some big tech and media executives are saying about remote versus hybrid versus in office work. But can we trust them? Is what they're saying really true? Here's Stephen injured ica on whether it's actually the case were more creative or productive in person.

There is some data about some of the aspects of work we create more creative tivy. So there is a study done by a colleague of mine, colombia, and he did with colleagues from stanford, didn't experiment where people brain storm over zoom and they brain storm in person, and they come up with more ideas in person.

Turns out, then they have to, then they have a list of projects, and then they after, decide which are like the best ideas that they can actually do online as well. So I do think there is truth who that something in person works Better. But again, is IT forty hours or whatever the work week looks like that we do that? I don't think so, because you can probably then also do studies or you be more focused.

And when you can do IT at home or in a big open floor office, and you probably find you can probably be more focused when you are at home and the pick like the time when you are most productive in doing so. So there are certain task we do Better at home, and there is a certain task we do Better in the office. And now we just have to figure out what is the right mix and managed that well. I don't think that we need to for all the tasks that we do, we need to be in person. Even at disney, not all the tasks are like together, coming up with great stories for the hours week.

I do think there is something to that. I think being in person does do something to a working relationship that makes a little little bit juicer. why? I don't know what the definition of juicy is, but call IT a vibe, right?

Everyone who's listening knows what i'm talking about. Something is different when you meet someone in person. Having said that, take your real state budget and make IT a travel budget. Instead, let people get together for really intensive three day thing every quarter, rather than going into the office three days maybe or maybe not running into the person, having all of the discomforts of going into the office. And I think you can get maybe even a Better result out of your people.

Jessi makes a really important point there. A lot of attention in the remote versus in office debate comes from a lack of management effort and coordination. Companies just started trying hard enough to figure out whether there is a Better approach to hybrid that, that doesn't result in people sitting alone in office on zoom calls. Instead, Stephen told me, we need to really start thinking both about the type of work we're doing in the context in which that work is done.

We should not think about jobs. What we think should think about tasks. What am I doing in a given day, on a day in a given week? And there are certain tasks that work Better alone, deep focus work.

You don't get distracted, you just prepare. And you can do that whenever you're the most productive. That for some people, that's six o'clock in the morning, and for some people, that's the eleven P.

M. At night. And some do that Better in a coffee shop and some do that Better in their pajamas. And that's what flexibility allows.

There are other tasks that are Better maybe together, like having a brainstorming activity, solving a really complicated or talking about a really sensitive issue that is probably Better in person. now. Do we do those in person things? Or that were Better in person forty hours or fifty hours a week? no. Do we do the focus work forty, fifty hours a week now? So now we have to rethink about like how can we organize the day that take advantage of like we're together or we give people flexibility and that requires a little bit of coordination because like I don't want to go to the office and beyond zoom call.

that's my nights going to the office to be in. His uncle is my personal live.

Or do you go in there and it's half empty? There is nothing less motivating because is that sucks? So you want to make sure if you're there, you actually do something that is with other people together.

Remote days cannot look like in person days if they look the same, yeah, you're in zoom calls in the office and you are in meetings, which should be in person at home. And that just doesn't work. You have to actually exploit the advantages of remote and the advantages of being in the office and stack IT.

There's still one really big question that's been looming over this whole discussion. One we hinted that right at the beginning, laos s and these return to office Mandates really about headcount reduction here just can tell the answer is yes, least partially. But companies will never say that out loud. And while IT may not be the primary reason these companies are require employees to come back in, IT is certainly a beneficial side effect if you are accepting its looking to cut costs.

Let me tell you the other real reason that people are doing this right for technology companies. They were, for the longest time in gather market share mode, build and gather market share, which requires an enormous amount of effort. And people where we are building and we're gathering market here and we're growing at the fastest pace possible so that we can be at the top of our game.

And these companies have now reached kind of the peak of that work. They have built the thing now it's an iterative process of maintaining, of improving and continuing to grow incrementally, which means they need a lot less people than they did in growth mode. They are scaling back.

They are having layoffs. Have spoken with the CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in the world who said our company will never be bigger than IT is today. This is the biggest we will ever be from an employee had count standpoint.

And from now on, we will be getting leaner and we will be getting more efficient with less people. And that's true for most tech companies. So they want to shed employees.

They were hired. That was course corrected by the first round of layoffs that you saw last year. But now they're just trying to get leaner and more effective and efficient. And so they're gone to continue to lay people off. And this is a way to get people to leave without playing them off.

So where does that put amazon, as I mentioned, at the top of the epson, amazon C, O. And a jasa had a response to claims from employees that his companies return to office.

And IT was a quote back or lave, according to nbc, just he told the amazon employees at an all hand meeting that IT was simply not true that the company wanted to reduce headcount or that they had made any deals with city governments to help boost local economies by bringing workers back into offices. Instead, Jesse said, quote, this was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.

That echoes what a images on web services, C E O matt garman said at a separate all hands meeting last month. C B C also reported that at that time, garden said what we want to be in an environment where we are working together, and we feel that collaboration environment is incredibly important for our innovation and our culture. Garment claimed that nine out of ten employees were excited about the return to work.

And at one key part of office culture that he was trying to revive was the ability to disagree in debate in a pretty fund quote for anyone who has ever had to use an amazon internal video conferencing tool. Government said, quote, I don't know if you guys have tried to disagree via a trim call is very hard. We just take a quit break will be your effect.

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We're back with professor stuff and mayor and workplace culture experts, a rigger, discussing why companies want people back in the office and what's next for hybrid in rome network before the break of her justice. Say that some companies are indeed looking at headcount reduction is one of the many reasons to push employees back into the office.

And there is still just a lot of frustration and poor management, leading companies to think they need to back from hybrid and remote work. So how's this gona play out? I often look at this debate and get frustrated by the extremes inside.

Either people telling me that full remote is the future, award's come is like amazon and others, and you have to come in five days a week. The choice is always presented as a binary, but stuff, and thinks that ultimately hybrid is the way to go, even if IT leads to some painful trade. S like having to make tough decisions when and for how long to bring employees together for offsides. Stuff thinks most companies will choose hybrid to get access to a larger, more distributed pool of talent.

I actually think that like most organizations will end up in hybrid. And when you look at the the data, that's actually what turns out, a lot of organizations doing that. They don't do extremes, one or the other.

And I I know remote first companies who are doing just fine. And I I guess we're gona see companies that are all in the office there. Maybe your friends law firms are gone to be doing fine when they do so. But most organizations, I think, will end up in a hybrid world where you actually get the benefit of those personal interactions, but also the benefit of giving people's flexibility and that deep focus time that they will have when they at home.

One of the big promises of being full remote is that you have access to a larger talent pool. You can hire people, whether they are across the country, maybe even across the world, and they can all come work for you. And that's now every company globally competitive in a way that was really hard to be before.

But if you're talking about hybrid, you're talk king about coming in two or three days a week and being flexible and having these moments where you can just pull people in because you need them, everyone thought has to be an arrange, right? You have to be somewhat available, not completely available. Is that pushing back against this notion that we'll just have a totally distributed workforce and pull talent from all these serve non traditional taxi ties?

Yeah, I think that's the trade off when we do hybrid people have to work. He'd left closer. Now if you only come in to new york city three days a week, you know, you can maybe take a little long or commute on those three days, and if you have to come five, but you can't live in sydney, sydney might be hard because the different darm zone, but you can't like live in it's hard to live in upstate, even upstate new york, where we would have the same time so on so we can do a lot of synchronous work, but not together in the office. Yeah, I think that's the trade off.

And if it's for the organization really difficult to find talent in a location, I think you might go for a very distributed workforce. You bring people together for, like those retreats on steroids that there is grouped dying. And there is a lot of the trust building happens than in person.

You can do that. People can fly and wherever for a week or two, and then they go back to their work. But IT IT depends a lot like how hot is IT to attract talent, what talent do you need? And and then you trade off the outside of that. You can access that much, much larger talent pool, those trade.

After why Jessica ultimately disagrees.

I think that eventually we will all be working from home, not next year, but eventually IT does feel inevitable. To me, hybrid has been shown to be one of the hardest models to implement effectively. I do think that of all the models working from home, one hundred percent is the best.

And they're planning in companies that are one hundred percent remote. Many companies have made a very great results with the company that one hundred percent remote. And many companies are highly successful being in the office five days a week, right? And then there are, of course, those jobs where you have to be in the office or you have to be on the factory floor.

And those will always be, you know, in manufacturing, for example, you have to be there, right? But hybrid has been very complicated for the reasons you talked about. You go to the office to get on a zoom.

You go to the office and people pick a different day to go to the office and no one's there. So hybrid is hard being one hundred percent. One of the other is a little bit easier.

And I think that it'll take a while, but eventually, more people will be working from home than not. It's absolutely true that you have a larger talent pool when your company is remote because you're pulling from a larger pool of people. And so you can be more selective and get higher level talent right then if you're geographically land locked, so to speak.

So that's unequipped true. There's no argument against that. I think moving forward, this is the differentiator, right? I would love for the companies that our organization compete again to force people back into the office because this will become a deferential or for me then, and for the job openings that I have that we are remote, you can work from home, come and apply over here, don't go to our competitors.

They're going to make you go in the office five days a week. And that also is a competitive age in a differentiator just to be offering that. I have been approached by a lot of organizations to move and take on other rules with Better pay and more power, more influence, more whatever IT is that everyone wants in their career in.

But you've gotta go into the office five days a week and I said, no, thank you. There's no way. I just it's not part of my value system anymore. And there are a lot of people like me.

What does seem very clear to me, and what I heard from both Jessica and steffen, is that the idea that we can just turn back the clock to before the pandemic and do what we did before, because that was easier and I going to happen. The world is a different place. Now, before the pandemic, remote work was treated either as a luxury or something, only a small handful of companies or startups could successfully pull off.

But after for twenty, twenty, we all saw IT worked. And as you'll hear, both stuff in adjust to say, this isn't just a new way of doing things. This is an entirely new reality, one that can just beyond one.

People got a tests of that is actually possible and really nice to have also that flexibility. So now pushing back from that new default is gonna be really hard before the pandemic, and nobody actually thought about that hard. Oh, could we do hybrid? There were like some really four of looking organizations are doing that.

Most organizations was like, we do five. We come five days away, like every in the summer. Maybe you have like friday afternoon off, but very few actually really being visionary about that. But now we tasted IT and always like is actually possible.

We have unlocked a new belief due to the experience of covered. We all had an experience that was transformative for us in the way we think about work and where work can be done and how productive we can be at home. And that's not going away, right?

We know that now. And if you think about the people who are forcing people back into the office and the language used around that, it's quite telling, return, return to office, go back to the office. Those are regressive phrases that are about going backwards to the way that IT was before covet.

They're acting like covered was a pause on Normal, and now we can on pause and go back to Normal, as if I didn't completely transform our thinking in the nature of the global economy. IT did transform. Now we are different.

We've been shipped to be different because of what was a global catastrophic event, totally up ended businesses in people's personal lives. And so our new beliefs exist. And so that is that's here to stay.

What happened as a change, a change in the nature of work. And the companies that are trying to force people back into the office are not able to adapt. They're trying to just go back to how I always husband. So those those are not the companies that I believe will win.

So where does that leave amazon? Just a says, he thinks of any other companies that are requiring people to come back to the office. Amazon is the one that will move the needle the most, but in what direction we're going up to way and see Chelsea says that amazon is the kind of company that one IT really comes down to IT adapt to whatever situation best suits the business.

I think there will be a seismic shift. They have made a commitment in their executive close stores meeting to take this to the limit. Amazon has gone in the public eye, has done media interviews, has adamantly shared that this is happening.

And so I think they're prepared for the seismic shift that will happen as a result of that. I think it's gona shake things up. So I think they're you'll go through with that.

I think something will shift. I think we'll all see what that is. And no one really knows what that is because this is the first of its kind. And I think the other tech companies will follow based on how to goes with amazon.

I like something and justice a for joining me on the coder and thank you for listening. I hope you enjoyed IT. You have thought this episode and i'm sure you do.

You can email us a decoder at the verge to on we really do read all the emails. You could also hit me up directly on threads and a record vey well. So a tiktok checked out.

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Our producers are kate cox and next or editor is calling right or supervising producers liam James that a coder. Music is my break mater cylinder. Let's see you next time.

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