Office Mandates: Epic Fail.
Amazon's RTO Mandate Backfired. Here's Why.
Amazon's September 2024 return-to-office mandate sparked immediate backlash. 73% of 2,585 verified employees surveyed by anonymous job review site Blind considered resigning the day after CEO Andy Jassy announced the five-day-in-office requirement.
Half of UK HR decision-makers now cite employee retention as their biggest challenge, according to a 2024 Ciphr survey. Rigid office mandates undermine the cultural transformation required after structural workplace shifts from 2020 onward—shifts that gave workers new freedoms and triggered what became known as the "Great Resignation."
Jennifer Moss, workplace culture expert and author of Why Are We Here? Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants, states that RTO mandates contradict their stated goals: "They don't improve cohesion; they don't improve productivity. They're contrary to the goals of leadership."
Workplace culture requires intentional design around four pillars: inclusive hiring that disrupts conformity bias, purposeful connection beyond proximity, lifelong learning that provides fulfillment, and well-being rooted in genuine care rather than surface perks.
Hire for Added Perspective, Eliminate Conformity Filters
Hiring practices reveal organizational values before day one. Companies claiming to value joy but operating painful, dragged-out interview processes expose cultural contradictions, according to Eric Stutzman, CEO at the Achieve Centre for Leadership and co-author of The Culture Question.
The "culture fit" hiring model reinforces homogeneity. Ruchika Malhotra, author of Inclusion on Purpose, identifies the cognitive trap: humans naturally seek validation through similarity, causing perfectly qualified candidates to be filtered out based on race, gender, or other identity markers. Gut feelings and unconscious bias dominate these decisions.
L'Oréal deployed an AI chatbot to manage applicant communications, achieving 92% candidate satisfaction. However, AI tools analyzing CVs, social profiles, and interview scripts to predict cultural alignment risk encoding the biases of their designers into hiring systems, Malhotra warns.
What works instead: Adopt a "culture add" framework that actively pursues candidates bringing diverse perspectives and skills. Design hiring processes that disrupt subconscious bias patterns rather than reinforce them.
Create workplace environments where everyone feels safe to speak up and take risks—which only happens when managers understand how to lead diverse workforces.
Use Office Space for Strategic Collaboration, Not Surveillance
Connection requires strategic design, not physical mandates.
Australian software firm Atlassian operates under a "Team Anywhere" model, with staff logging in from 10,000 different locations while maintaining access to 12 global satellite offices. The company intentionally convenes entire teams in person three to four times annually, ensuring each gathering has clear purpose.
Research shows this approach creates cultural impact and connection lasting up to five months—far exceeding the benefits of regular office attendance.
Current office use wastes time: colleagues sit side by side on Zoom calls or complete tasks without collaboration, generating no meaningful cohesion or relational energy, according to Moss. Any time spent in offices without collaboration is wasted.
What works instead: Reposition offices as spaces geared toward activities that proactively support productive relationships. Host designated team-building activities on in-office days. Organize sprint work sessions where teams collaborate on specific shared tasks. Build team cohesion into the regular cadence of work rather than expecting proximity to generate connection automatically.
Build Learning Systems that Replace Traditional Loyalty
One-fifth of workers have considered quitting jobs they found insufficiently meaningful, according to a recent Adecco poll. Three-quarters of large employers agree that purpose strongly connects to staff retention.
Old employer-employee dynamics built on reciprocal loyalty have eroded. Organizations must create cultures of lifelong learning to provide fulfillment through new mechanisms, according to Gianpiero Petriglieri, associate professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD.
Petriglieri explains: "There's an understanding that the less loyalty you offer, the more you must promise learning because people need to feel they are still looked after."
Two types of learning matter:
Instrumental learning defines competency models, assesses teams against standards, identifies gaps, and provides deliberate practice opportunities to close performance gaps. Over-reliance on this model creates cultures that become "too stuck, too ossified around the norm," Petriglieri warns.
Humanistic learning encourages skill divergence from established norms through constant invitation to discover alternative ways of seeing the world. The primary goal shifts from incorporation to individuation, learning that fosters unique perspectives rather than conformity.
Examples of companies balancing both:
Google operates peer-to-peer learning (g2g) programs. AT&T launched the Future Ready Initiative. Adobe developed the Kickbox program. These in-work learning platforms balance instrumental and humanistic approaches, providing fulfillment where loyalty once existed.
Communicate Care Through Comprehensive Well-Being Programs
The O.C. Tanner Institute's 2024 annual report identifies what's missing in workplace well-being: "the communication of care", a holistic approach encompassing mental, physical, and emotional health. Research found that when employees feel satisfied with tangible and intangible benefits, they report 759% greater sense of thriving at work, 422% higher sense of purpose, and 285% higher-quality output.
Sleep pods and premium coffee machines don't constitute well-being. Stutzman defines genuine well-being as manager capacity to understand employee complexity and create conditions for thriving: "A manager's job is to understand who you are in your full complexity and create conditions in which you can thrive. True well-being is when I can say: 'Are you OK? What's happening with you at home? What do you need at work to be able to thrive today?'"
Prepare Teams Before Deploying AI Tools
Half of workers feel anxious about AI, making the idea of AI fixing their anxiety tone-deaf, Moss observes. Building great cultures requires addressing psychological barriers, including allocating time and space for people to learn about AI.
Digital anthropologist Giles Crouch warns that introducing new technology impacts culture by changing power structures and desired outcomes: "When you introduce a new technology, it's going to have an impact on the culture. If you don't understand that at the start, if HR hasn't developed a system to deal with that, that's when you're going to run into problems down the road."
What to Do in 2026
Audit every hiring touchpoint for bias: Review job advert language, interview timeline, assessment criteria. Eliminate conformity filters in favor of added perspective.
Designate in-person office days for collaboration sprints: Stop treating offices as default work locations. Use in-person time exclusively for team-building and shared problem-solving.
Build dual-track learning systems: Balance skill standardization (instrumental learning) with individuation and exploration (humanistic learning) to replace eroded loyalty structures.
Train managers to ask what employees need to thrive: Stop accumulating surface perks and calling it well-being. Train managers to have genuine conversations about what people need.
Ongoing: Allocate structured time for teams to understand AI tools: Before deploying new AI tools, give teams time to learn, experiment, and ask questions to avoid anxiety and resistance.
Bottom Line
Organizations attempting to mandate culture through office presence misunderstand post-pandemic workplace transformation. Retention depends on inclusive hiring that disrupts conformity, purposeful office use that generates connection, lifelong learning that replaces eroded loyalty, holistic well-being rooted in genuine care, and prepared teams before technology deployment.
Strategic intention drives culture, not blunt instruments like five-day office mandates. Amazon's 73% resignation consideration rate proves what happens when leaders confuse proximity with connection.
