Three Steps to Help Amazon’s RTO Plan Succeed
Without establishing a strong, world-saving mission, plus new workflows and systems, CEOs who command workers to return to office full time risk unintentionally sabotaging their organization. Here’s how to balance leadership needs with your team’s new reality.
By Caroline Stokes, founder of FORWARD
In her recent newsletter, author, industrial-organizational psychology professor and very good friend Ludmila Praslova shared both her thoughts about Amazon’s return-to-office policy and an excerpt from her book The Canary Code in which I discuss my own unique neurodiversity in the workplace and why one size doesn’t fit all.
Like many neurotypicals, neurodivergent individuals’ brains adapt and perform best in optimal environments, cultures, and rituals. During the pandemic, many of us found we could focus better and deliver more work in remote-flexible or remote-first environments.
Why is this relevant now?
Regardless of neurotype, many people – not all – found that working remotely allowed for greater balance, productivity and performance.
In a world of burned-out employees due to workplace unfairness, this isn’t just about comfort — it’s about optimal, sustainable human performance. In fact, studies are showing that flexible environments can often lead to better outcomes in focus, innovation, and overall job satisfaction and less burnout.
On the other hand, I also understand where many CEOs and VPs are coming from.
From a culture and performance perspective, it’s natural to believe that being in one physical space fosters greater collaboration, innovation, and productivity.
If I were a leader unable to feel the pulse of my team daily while witnessing declining profits, engagement, and culture surveys, I’d probably feel the need to bring people together to hold back economic, geopolitical, and societal tides, too. It’s an instinctively protective, back-to-basics move. If it worked in 2019 before the storm of the pandemic and fallout of today’s geopolitical and economic reality, it’s going to work again in 2024 for the polycrisis we’re currently experiencing.
Right?
Forcing a return to the office — especially after we’ve adapted to remote work — could bring a significant consequential shift that impacts innovation, productivity, mental health, and even more challenging results when it comes to conflict in team dynamics. Workplace culture thought leader Bruce Daisley wrote in his newsletter this week that he predicts Amazon will lose 30% of its workforce with this new policy.
How CEOs can fix this predictable situation
CEOs need to create a first 100-days program throughout the organization to enable the great cultural re-adjustment creating a deeper emotional and intellectual understanding of the organization’s key mission and OKRs and a clearer sense of purpose and belonging for this next economic, societal and environmental phase. This needs to include a massive collective shift in governance across cybersecurity and climate – which everyone should be aware of to understand the high-stakes situations organizations and society are facing in parallel.
Give your people a reason beyond themselves that makes them gasp as they shift from cynicism to excitement.
Job security is rarely a key driver for employee engagement, loyalty, collaborative energy or unstoppable drive and innovative mindset. A threat to job security only breeds cynicism and distrust and once that trust is broken, your employees will be saving their best ideas for their own start-ups or your competitors.
No matter whether your two-day-a-week remote worker now moves to zero remote days, choosing to ignore how your employees respond to the “command to return to the office full-time, or else” is a low-empathy move which will — let’s face it — result in unsuitable professional behaviours in the long run. This is not good for shareholder or customer signalling, either.
Commanding your employees to do anything is unfortunately a recipe for a quiet, or not so quiet, revolt.
After all, a “command” in a democratic society is a toxic signal, isn’t it?
What will actually work?
The way forward for any CEO who truly believes that their people will create the environment they envision to sustainably drive their business forward is this: establish new workflows and rituals alongside team dynamics and OKRs – rooted in a primary world-saving or ground-breaking mission – all at once.
As I often like to say to some of the leaders I coach, “Whether you like this imagery, or not, you’re in a war room leading the collective with one key business-making or business-destroying situation and challenge to solve. People need to know what they are fighting for to change the way they work and commit to something bigger than themselves.”
This framing is crucial to avoid loss of critical talent to take your vision forward, or expect other behaviours such as absenteeism, presenteeism, an increase in mental health challenges, bullying, antagonism, avoidant behaviours, and more.
A CEO who underestimates the psychological impact of returning to office five days a week without putting in place all the real reasons to be in one location together and without building crucially sustainable systems for all, will unintentionally and blindly sabotage their own organization within the first year. This means a potential decline in the S-Curve, which I suspect CEOs like Andy Jassy are purposely choosing to avoid in their all-hands-on-deck commander-mode role.
How can we bridge this gap?
We’re at an inflection point in culture, economics, technology, the environment, and society that isn’t fully being considered or communicated effectively in today’s new return-to-office policies. Navigated successfully, it will truly help all employees and stakeholders understand their part in the new S-Curve of their professional and organizational growth.
How do I know this to be true?
Ever since working at Sony in the 90s as employee #9 to launch PlayStation to a global market dominated by Nintendo and Sega, I deliberately embodied intentional world-changing and world-domination energy. I did so against all odds and despite the politics, economic recession, technology advancements and societal shifts of that time.
My clients are seeking that kind of energy internally from their teams, but they’re also seeking that kind of clarity and world-changing mission from the top. Without it, why would people come back to the office five days a week without feeling like their presence requires their absolute talent to deliver?
If people are more scared about adjusting their life to RTO full time instead of being exhilaratingly scared about jumping on a rocket ship at work to create something ground-breaking, world-changing or world-defining, your people are in the job for the wrong reasons, and they won’t do their best work. They need to know what that rocket ship mission is and how the system will support them in that process. Give your people a reason beyond themselves that makes them gasp as they shift from cynicism to excitement.
I’m hired by my clients to bring that energy to generate the results they demand from themselves and their employees. I’m direct. I’m competitive. I focus on systems thinking. I’m also brimming with workplace emotional intelligence and empathy towards all internal business and external to business parts required to make the mission work.
A CEO requires a gutsy mission and culture model to innovate and drive the results that will change the world.
This is where I come in with the stakeholder coaching approach.
Here’s how I can help:
- Tailored Transition Strategies: I specialize in helping teams transition smoothly back to the office, or into hybrid models, while keeping both neurodivergent and neurotypical needs in mind. This helps evolve and foster innovation, establish and maintain productivity, and protect mental health. We do this alongside all the externalities your people need to traverse, including long-term innovation goals, AI, internal politics, resource challenges, policy, geopolitics, environmental pressures, economic changes, and ESG mandates all the way through to something as normal as managing the redirection, overwhelm and planning when someone in the primary stakeholder brain trust goes on maternity leave and the team needs to hire, train someone up, or share the load.
- Neurodiverse Collaboration Models: Based on my experiences as a coach for neurotypical and neurodivergent brains with a myriad of life-impacting stressors, I’ve developed strategies that build collective “brain equity” — ways to maximize collaboration and creativity without requiring physical proximity. This can help you get the best from your entire workforce, regardless of where they’re working from. But this requires a fully intentional CEO and C-suite to bravely take this path, if the leadership team truly want to curate a new model.
- Leadership Coaching for the First 100 Days: I provide coaching to leaders and teams, helping them implement systems to closely observe team dynamics, support their people during this adjustment period, and drive the culture they want in a sustainable way to create the innovation and collaboration they truly seek.
Ready to make the transition work for everyone?
If you’re looking for a way to balance your new leadership vision and needs with your team’s new multi-perspective realities, let’s talk. I’m here to help you design a transition that drives fast engagement to a new plan enabling innovation to flow and productivity to soar within 100 days — while being mindful of everyone’s needs.
Want to talk? You can reach me at caroline@theforward.co or via LinkedIn.
Here are some other resources I wrote on how to engage your organization:
Creating a new work culture (remote-first/hybrid/full return to office), Fast Company
Why CEOs Need ‘Love’, Entrepreneur
How to start your first six months, Fast Company.
