By Albert de Plazaola
Among shifting cultural dynamics, corporations are increasingly asking employees to revert to pre-pandemic work models. While many companies continue to embrace and evolve a hybrid work model, in September 2023, a trio of the old guard – Goldman Sachs, Blackstone, and JP Morgan – abolished hybrid in favor of an all-in approach. Their reasoning centered on mentorship, cultural cohesion and the irreplaceable value of in-person deal-making.
Throughout 2024, announcements of U.S. corporate giants mandating a return to office (RTO) came in waves. Five-day mandates arrived from UPS and Boeing, from AT&T and Citi, from IBM and Salesforce. Silicon Valley took a turn, throwing Meta, Tesla and X into the melee of corporate enthusiasm. Each announcement brought its own rationale: UPS cited operational efficiency; Boeing emphasized engineering collaboration; and Salesforce’s Marc Benioff pointed to the direct correlation between office presence and performance among newer employees. In 2025, even the U.S. government is hopping on the RTO train.
But many businesses asking for a five-day in office return can’t see the forest for the trees. They’re setting themselves up for surreptitiously applied attrition as employees seek more balance in their lives, whether through saved commute hours, reduced water-cooler chat or selective socialization. Workplace transformations to lure workers back with the promise of collaboration spaces, wellness rooms and gourmet cafeterias are costing millions in redesigns and amenity upgrades. Yet employee sentiment is one thing that has remained stable in post-pandemic reporting: employees are most happy with a three-day in, two-day out hybrid work model, which most often takes the form of Mondays and Fridays at home.
Given the wide divide between what employees want and what employers think they want, it’s imperative for office owners and designers to distinguish between passing trends and changes that will become permanent fixtures of the workplace and the ways we exist within it.
The Workplace Benefits are Clear
The evidence for in-person working and teaming is profound: it benefits the individual, the team and the business. It influences corporate culture, stimulates creativity and strengthens brand identity.
Corporate real estate portfolios have undergone dramatic transformations to support this return, with companies investing heavily in technology-enabled meeting spaces, flexible furniture systems and enhanced acoustic treatments.
Clearly, businesses believe in those merits, none more than Amazon, which spent $1.4 billion on its Seattle workspace only for it to sit dormant for 14 months during a global pandemic. These newly configured offices, with a focus on collaboration zones over individual workstations, optimistically cast a significant bet on the future of workplace interaction. Additionally, Amazon’s HQ2 in Northern Virginia continues to move forward, the first phase alone aiming to be a home base to 14,000 employees, most of whom have already settled into a remote work routine.
But the company had a reality check that came in the form of a recent survey showing the immediate fallout from the five-day mandate. According to the data, 48% of Amazon’s corporate workforce is either actively seeking new jobs or planning to, and nearly half report to managers in different locations. The mandate’s goal of lively in-person collaboration has been undermined by time zone differences, with distributed teams defaulting to Slack for virtual meetings. A thorough adoption of five-day mandate remains elusive as the return to office was delayed due to insufficient workspace capacity in seven cities, including Austin, Texas; Dallas, and Phoenix.
As we begin 2025, are we going to look back at 2024 as the last year of hybrid work, or is the five-day work week an anomaly played out in a game of trial and error?
Culture Drives the Five-day Mandate
For Amazon, the five-day work week could have merit: as a big name, it naturally attracts candidates. While the lure of hybrid work offered by other tech companies may reduce Amazon’s talent pool, it certainly won’t keep the best and brightest from joining the tech behemoth. Five-day week mandates encourage high occupancy rates, keep facility costs justifiable, provide plenty of time to distribute coveted facility space across multiple teams, and – in theory – could reduce overtime demand as employees settle back into leaving the laptop at their desks before heading home.
But Amazon’s decision to mandate a five-day return reflects more than just traditional corporate thinking – it mirrors its operational model of controlled efficiency. With vast investments in physical infrastructure designed for synchronous collaboration, from its innovative spherical meeting spaces to carefully crafted team neighborhoods, Amazon’s workspace strategy aligns with its leadership principles of high standards and bias for action.
Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, representing billions in real estate investment, was designed specifically for the kind of rapid-fire innovation and decision-making that defined its pre-pandemic success. The company’s RTO stance seems to echo the belief that its most groundbreaking innovations – from Prime to AWS – emerged from the spontaneous collisions and intense collaborative sessions that full-time office presence enables. Yet this push for complete return raises questions about whether Amazon’s legendary “Day One” philosophy of adaptability contradicts its rigid stance on workplace flexibility.
Surely, U.S. corporations of scale and reach comparable to Amazon could also make a full return to the traditional workweek: one tethered more to a place than a task; defined by serendipitous encounters that spark opportunities, which would have otherwise been unrealized (as opposed to reaching out on an as-needed basis to specific employees with a specific skill set.) But even if it comes back, the U.S. may be an anomaly for the in-office five-day work week. Globally, the trend in many countries favors hybrid work as a new institution, and in the case of the city of Tokyo, fully eliminates one workday altogether.
A four-day Workweek?
Indeed, there are far-reaching and oft-studied benefits to a four-day work week, regardless of format. These include a 20% reduction of resource use in the form of carbon footprint and office energy consumption; greater blocks of time for individuals and families to focus on wellness, increased consumer activity and innovation; and social equity through a change in the model of employer sponsored benefits, caregiver structures and disability resources.
The Unispace Global Workplace Insights report found that 89% of employees surveyed are supportive of a four-day week and 56% are likely to support it even if it meant being in the office all four days.
As talent topples in favor of hybrid employers, decentralized work environments and self-governed workstyles, corporate giants like Amazon may ultimately stumble in the rankings of desirable environments, leaving only the most loyal and those whose remote-work environment is not conducive or sustainable for consistent performance and well-being.
Finding the Balance
The post-pandemic work environment continues to evolve, with U.S. corporate giants blazing traditional trails while global counterparts forge new paths through hybrid and shortened workweeks. As more companies navigate through 2025 and beyond, the true test will not be in mandating presence, but in cultivating environments that balance productivity with human needs. While Amazon and its peers may temporarily succeed in enforcing five-day office mandates, the long-term sustainability of this approach remains questionable in a world where talent increasingly gravitates toward flexibility. The future of work may ultimately be determined not by corporate edict, but by the silent vote of a workforce that has tasted the freedom of choice and found it sweet.
