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If your employer allows you to work remotely one or more days a week and you value that kind of flexibility, you probably weren’t happy to hear last week that Amazon would soon require its corporate employees to work five days a week to return to the office during the week.

Or when AT&T announced last year that it would consolidate offices and require managers to work on-site at least three days a week — meaning some managers who lived near an office that was closing had to move or quit .

Or even when JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, whose employees have already been working in the office for five days, publicly expressed displeasure last week that more government employees were not working on-site at federal buildings, which he described as “empty” to various News reports.

Whenever a major player publicly advocates for its employees to stay in the office full-time, there is concern that other employers will follow suit.

But for two main reasons, such public announcements do not mean that the benefits of remote work are generally disappearing.

1. A strict RTO mandate can be a cost-effective way for the employer to reduce staff

In Amazon’s case, CEO Andy Jassy said all the usual things about wanting to strengthen face-to-face collaboration and company culture in his memo announcing his new RTO mandate.

Most importantly, Jassy also highlighted his desire to reduce the oversupply of managers hired in recent years, which has led to more “layers,” including “a longer line of managers who feel like they need to be one.” “Go through the topic again before moving forward,” he said. To reduce the herd of managers, Jassy called on the company’s executives to “increase the ratio of individual employees to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.”

Typically, this can result in managers being fired. But Amazon said Wednesday that the claim was inaccurate. The effort to increase the ratio of individuals to managers is “not the same as eliminating positions and would not necessarily result in layoffs,” the company told CNN, noting that it “has no plans to increase total headcount in the year.” “To reduce the scope of this decision”.

But by imposing an unpopular requirement to be in the office five days a week, “middle managers who have been made wealthy enough will say, ‘I’m leaving,'” said Chris Williams, a former vice president of human resources at Microsoft, who said that He is also now a leadership consultant for C-level executives.

This saves a company the cost of providing severance pay because employees leave voluntarily.

Jassy’s risk is that too many managers quit. “He will solve his short-term problem. But he will have a hard time convincing new employees to commute to downtown Seattle five days a week. So he could have a recruiting problem in the future,” Williams said.

If so, Amazon may eventually — and quietly — have to back away from enforcing the new five-day week requirement to attract talent, he suggested.

While an individual company may choose to waive its remote work policies, the numbers suggest this is not the case on a large scale.

Workplace consulting firm Gallup found in May that 53% of full-time, remote workers have a hybrid schedule, 27% work exclusively remotely, and 21% work on-site. These are approximately the same percentages as in November 2022.

As of August 31, job postings on Indeed.com that address hybrid and remote work have declined half a percentage point year-over-year. But according to Nick Bunker, Indeed’s North American economic research director, that’s largely because the industries that tend to have the most remote-skilled jobs (such as software development) have been hiring fewer people recently have.

Meanwhile, a Conference Board survey of U.S. workers found that workplace flexibility is the most important element of overall compensation, along with a competitive salary. It also found that HR leaders say hybrid work models help attract and retain talent.

So it’s no surprise that Gallup also found that 64% of those working fully remotely and 29% of those working hybrid said they would be “very likely” to look for another job “if.” Your employer decides not to offer you remote work options or always long-term.”

Many CEOs appear to have gotten the memo. The Conference Board reported in January that only 4% of U.S. CEOs said they would prioritize returning employees to the office full-time.

Williams noted, “I have yet to speak to an enlightened CEO who honestly believes that the only way to create a good (work) culture is through personal contact.”

This story has been updated to add additional context.