Exclusive survey: In response to Amazon’s RTO policy, nearly half its office workers are looking for new jobs

In September, Amazon made an announcement that came as a surprise to many corporate employees, along with tech observers who might have assumed hybrid work was a given among the industry’s major players. Starting in January, the tech giant would require that all employees come back to the office five days a week, in a rebuke of the hybrid policy that is common across tech.Many employees were still chafing against the demands of Amazon’s three-day return-to-office mandate, which was implemented in 2023 and had already required that certain workers move closer to an office or resign. The latest iteration of Amazon’s policy, however, goes several steps beyond that—and it already seems to be driving employees to leave the company.

A former design technologist who asked to remain anonymous to protect his identity said he made the decision to resign just a few weeks ago, after over a decade at Amazon. His decision was fueled in part by frustration with the mounting RTO mandates—which he claims are more rigid than Amazon’s pre-pandemic approach to remote work—and how they were affecting his colleagues’ lives. But he also felt that senior leadership did not have clear reasons for forcing employees back into the office, especially given Jassy had previously expressed his support for continued remote work.

“For me, it was what I felt was dishonest communication from up top, and the impact that I kept seeing from this policy,” he told Fast Company. “As far as I’m concerned, this group of people at the top lied to me [and] tried to gaslight us. And I don’t see how I can trust any other decisions that they are making.”

A new survey conducted by the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a labor union coalition that aims to hold corporations accountable through research and campaigns, set out to capture sentiment among corporate workers at Amazon following the latest mandate.

The survey, which polled 1,065 employees through the month of November and was released today, reveals that a substantial share of the company’s corporate workforce already has a foot out the door: Nearly half of respondents (48%) claimed to have already applied for new jobs, while 68% said they were “somewhat likely” or “very likely” to leave Amazon within the next year. (SOC reached workers through public social media platforms and a handful of digital ads, and workers also circulated it amongst themselves on private forums like Discord.)

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and other senior leaders have framed the decision to fully return to the office as a crucial way to boost collaboration and innovation, arguing that the existing in-office requirement had only “strengthened” that belief. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote in September. (Amazon did not provide a comment on the record for this story.)

But the vast majority of surveyed workers dismissed this notion; 81% said their relationships with coworkers would either remain the same or perhaps become worse as a result of the new policy, and even more respondents anticipated their productivity would decrease. In fact, many of them (45%) said that they weren’t even assigned to the same office as their manager, while 38% said they only worked alongside a fraction of their team members—either 20% or less.

A significant portion of the surveyed employees (59%) had been hired remotely, or at least with the promise of a hybrid work arrangement; workers in that position did not necessarily live close to an Amazon hub. Despite that, nearly a quarter of workers surveyed by SOC (23%) have already moved at least once to comply with Amazon’s RTO policy—and following the five-day policy, a greater share of workers (26%) expect they will be forced to move.

A senior cloud infrastructure architect—who recently left Amazon and asked to remain anonymous due to career repercussions—had joined in 2020 and was told his role would be permanently remote. While he wasn’t impacted by the previous in-office requirement, he said there was little clarity on whether he would be expected to relocate when the latest mandate was issued. “I wasn’t going to wait to get fired,” he told Fast Company. “So that’s why I left early.”

The survey findings are largely in line with media reports and employee feedback on platforms like Blind and Glassdoor—not to mention prevailing sentiment in the “Remote Advocacy” internal Slack channel, which has more than 30,000 members, according to former Amazon workers. But the SOC survey also highlights the disproportionate impact of Amazon’s policies on caregivers and disabled employees, something experts have warned about as return-to-office mandates have grown more popular.

Among the 38% of respondents who cited childcare or caregiving duties, just about all of them (93%) said the new in-office policy would make it more difficult for them to juggle those responsibilities. Those employees were also more likely to have scoped out new jobs: 57% of caregivers said they had applied to roles outside of Amazon, compared to 43% of other workers.

Meanwhile, many disabled workers—who accounted for about 21% of survey respondents—have already struggled to get exemptions that allow them to work from home. Of those who had sought out an exemption to work from home due to the RTO requirement imposed in 2023, 45% said their request was denied. Of course, that figure does not take into account the share of disabled employees who might be further impacted under the new mandate: A recent Bloomberg report revealed that Amazon is revising its policy around exemptions for disabled workers, effectively making it more difficult for them to get accommodations to work from home.

Some leaders across the tech industry have admitted RTO mandates were partly intended to trim headcount, and employers now anticipate some degree of turnover when they mandate that employees must return to the office. It likely doesn’t help when the rollout of these policies is not particularly smooth, which also seems to be the case at Amazon. This week, Business Insider reported that Amazon offices in certain locations, including New York and Houston, were not prepared to welcome employees back in January. (An Amazon spokesperson told Fast Company that offices would be ready for the vast majority of employees by January, but that there were different timelines for some locations.)

Perhaps most crucially for Amazon, however, these policy changes—and the messaging behind them—appear to have eroded trust among their employee base. When the survey asked for their reaction to the statement “I can trust my employer to follow through on its promises and commitments,” 84% of Amazon workers said they disagreed. Over three-quarters of respondents also said they would no longer recommend that a friend apply for a job at Amazon.

The senior cloud infrastructure architect who recently left Amazon said it felt like he had landed a “dream job” when he first got hired in 2020. “In my mind, I was thinking: I just found the company I’m going to retire from,” he said. But all that changed over the last two years, as senior leadership doubled down on bringing employees back to the office.

“The first time I said this isn’t going to be the company for me longterm was [in 2023] when Jassy said anyone who wasn’t happy with his non-data-driven decree should just leave—that we weren’t welcome,” he said. “Even though I wasn’t affected by the decree at the time, in my head, I’m going: Well, if that’s how flippant senior leadership is going to be to employees, why would I want to be here at all?”