Support for this episode comes from AWS. AWS Generative AI gives you the tools to power your business forward with the security and speed of the world's most experienced cloud. For many people, the pendulum hissed wrong wildly, between working fully remote and now pushed return to office from their bosses. And there are a lot of theories about what might be motivating big companies to try and bring everyone back.
Here in Decoder I've talked to lots of CEOs about the benefits of working fully remote, versus hybrid, or having everyone back in the office over the past several years. And I've heard the full spectrum of responses. Some executives are adamant that people need to be in the office, and others are equally adamant that fully remote is the way to go. We'll play some of those answers for you in this episode, so you can get a sense of the enormous range of opinions here.
If you look at the surveys, it's basically 50-50. Quite a lot of people want to work remotely, and they can be pretty loud online. But there are a lot of people who are often quieter, who want to go back to the office for pretty good reasons. Some folks just don't have this face to work at home, or they're simply tired of making video calls in sweatpants all day and never really leaving the house.
I know some people who really like being able to just leave work at the office when they head home from the day, and I've heard from a lot of younger people who are struggling to get face time with the more senior and experienced people of their companies in order to build relationships and grow their networks. The messy middle of all this is what quite a few companies have settled on, hybrid work, which allows some people to be in the office while others work remotely.
This can work. This is how the verge runs, and I quite like it, but it's not perfect. Like so many people who work in a hybrid environment, there are days where I go into a mostly empty office and then sit on a video call. And then there are days where I realize I'm the only one at home because everyone else has gone into the office. Figuring out how to make hybrid work is a long-term cultural project that we only really started in 2020.
And while there are some obvious benefits, it's not clear if anyone's really cracked it in a way that scales across different kinds of companies. And now some companies have decided that the effort just isn't worth it. In September, Amazon mandated that all employees have to return to the office for five days a week starting in January.
In the memo announcing the change, CEO Andy Jassy argued that the company had observed that it's easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture, that collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective. And that teams tend to be better connected to one another when everyone was in the office. And Amazon isn't alone wanting employees back at their desks.
Companies like Disney and Salesforce have made similar arguments in pushing from employees to come back to the office for at least four days a week. Apple has been steadily pressuring people to come back to the office for a while now. That beautiful spaceship office in Cupertino wasn't built to stay empty. But is the returned office really about building company culture and being more creative and productive?
As I tell you, there's a huge chunk of the virgin decoder audience that is absolutely convinced that any returned office announcement is actually just to lay off in disguise. We get emails and comments making this case every time one of these moves is announced. Jassy even addressed this directly just a few days ago in an all hands meeting. Responding to claims that the return to work mandate is a quote backdoor layoff, he told employees that that is simply not true.
We'll come back to that later on. So I want to know what's going on and what the real reasons behind returned office might be. Then honestly, where this is all going next? To explain it, I caught up with two experts on the subject, Stefan Meyer, a professor of business strategy at Columbia Business School, and Jessica Kriegel, the chief strategy officer at workplace culture consultancy, culture partners.
We dove into what's been happening to the nature of work today, and you'll hear both of them lay out some of the key reasons behind the return to office push. You also try to figure out if Amazon is just an outlier, or as you'll hear Jessica say, the tip of the spear and what could be something much bigger. Okay, return to office when it's really all about. Here we go. Let's start by zooming out for a bit. The pandemic dramatically changed office culture in the beginning of 2020.
We put our laptops in the stack of books, we bought the Logitech webcam, or at least we tried to buy a Logitech webcam, and we adjusted. It was hard. It was not even really that long ago. Here at the verge, we went full remote, and apart from a few of us that sometimes go into or near office, we hadn't really gone back. But fast forward a few years after the pandemic lockdowns lifted, and a lot of companies were really yearning for a return to normal.
In quick succession, Apple, Google, Meta, and Microsoft all announced that employees had to stop moving around, settle in a big city with a local office, and be at their desks for something like three days a week, with a lot of flexibility and exceptions.
And all along, Amazon has been moving towards a full return to office. The company had a flexible policy of putting place in 2021, where managers could mostly decide how, and under what circumstances teams could work remotely, but in 2023, the company went hybrid, requiring people to come in three days a week. And now in 2024, Amazon is back at five days a week in the office. But how is all this played out across the workforce?
Both Stefan and Jessica told me that remote work, which made up about 5% of how US employees spent their work days before the pandemic jumped to nearly 70% in 2020. Since that peak, however, it has been dropping fast and it's plateaued now that hybrid has become the norm. Here's Jessica. I think 30% of people were working in some hybrid environment last year, and we had plateaued in that return to office trend post COVID, but now that plateau is starting to move again.
So Amazon is the tip of the spear and other organizations are following. So I really think this is going to be the 2025 workplace trend is getting everyone back in the office. And it's not just back in the office. It's back in the office full time. It's five days a week. It's sitting in a sign seats.
And the problem that I see with that is that you've got people who are being forced to commute, forced to sit in uncomfortable clothes in a cubicle and deal with the cafeteria food or whatever it is when they've, they've enjoyed a different way for the last few years. When I talk to Stefan, he was also pretty unconvinced that this is going to pan out well for employers. And he agreed that Amazon's mandate does seem to be a major volley in something he's calling the war for the return to office.
I don't think it actually the numbers changed up much, but somehow the rhetoric did. Is this as I sometimes call like this war for return to the office, which on one hand leaders who like some for whatever reason want like people back. And a lot of employees who don't want to go back, it definitely not five days a week are the executives winning on that front. And I personally don't think they will in the end because hybrid is in my view the future and if done right, it will be successful.
But why do we have to go back to the office? That question turns out it's pretty complicated because there are the stated reasons what a company will put in a press release. And there are what you might call the implicit reasons the kind of conventional wisdom we all think is true. Those overlap quite a bit and sometimes pretty obvious ways we've heard them before.
The claim is always we are quote losing our culture, which I don't even know what that means is the culture expert I've no idea what losing a culture is or how that would manifest because it's a total make believe cliche idea that is an excuse right. What I think they mean is we don't know how to manage people remotely. And so therefore we're just going to go back into the office because it was easier that way.
But they're saying they're losing their culture. They're saying that they need to be more collaborative and they need to create the moments of impact where people run into each other in the hallway at the water cooler where they can sit in a break room and collaborate about an idea that can stand in front of a white board and doodle things on the wall and be more creative and as a result.
Be better at their jobs. That's what they're saying that people will be better at their jobs if they come into the office five days a week. Alright, so those are the sanitized reasons the things that go into press releases the big companies and bosses will put their names on. But according to a Jessica and Stefan, while the productivity and culture angles are good enough excuses return to office mandates are often about something few with any employers would ever really say out loud control.
If you've been on a good sports team that has like the energy that can really move mountains and you can achieve like really amazing stuff. So there is some good reasons to be back in the office at least some days. Sometimes the team has to be back and we have to have face to face interaction and certain tasks are going to be better done if we're actually sitting together in a room.
But there are terrible reasons to bring people back leaders might have the illusion that they can control their employees better when they're in the office because they somehow think if with their buttons are in the chair in the office, then they're working harder than it at home. So I think one of the real reasons that people want to go back into the office is because they're totally lost on how to drive results in a hybrid environment.
They cannot figure out how to stop tracking activity and start tracking outcomes and performance managed to outcomes, which is great leadership and harder leadership.
But they're so used to keeping their eyeballs on people and making sure people are doing their work and asking them, you know, if I'm the head of sales, what I'm doing is I'm saying, how many calls did you make? Did you make the calls? Did you put the calls and sales force? Did you get the AI bot to listen to your calls to give us some ideas about how your calls could be better.
That's what most leaders do is they're just managing activity and it's lazy leadership and it's not elevated leadership and it doesn't work. It's really much easier to do in person than it is in a hybrid environment. If you were managing to outcomes, you would know that it's just as easy to manage in a virtual environment as it is in a in person environment, but it's harder to do.
So I think one is management doesn't have the skills to lead in a virtual environment. And so executives are seeing that their managers are failing and they are forcing people back into the office because they don't know how to get their managers to be better. A second reason is a lack of trust. They just think that people are quote stealing the company's time by doing laundry and going to their soccer game, etc. And it's a mindset issue in which you think that their time is belongs to you.
And that if they're doing anything other than focusing on productivity in that moment that therefore they're being, you know, unethical, which is more silliness. And then you have kind of the the meta reason, which is I as a leader want to have control and command and control is where I have more power. I have more influence and I have the ability to make this decision and I'm going to command people back into the office. And so and why not?
So companies are actually leading the charge here Amazon is the obvious one, of course, it's one of the biggest employers in the country and it has huge workforce of fulfillment and delivery workers who have been back at work in warehouses and delivery vans for years now.
They simply can't do their jobs from home. But according to Jessica, it's more about leverage whether company believes are enough people out there that want to work there more than they prioritize the flexibility of being remote.
I think it's a company that has a brand that is attractive any company. So high tech firms, Disney, for example, is attractive people want to work there. And so they have the ability to say we're going to make it hard for you and we don't care because we know that behind you are 100 other candidates who would like to have your job. So there's all the real reasons that underlie the spoken reasons that people are saying this. But if you have a good brand, you can get away with it. And so they are.
Now, some of this can feel like it's limited to the tech industry or a specific set of what you might call laptop jobs. There are tons of people out there who simply have no choice but to be at work in retail and restaurants and entertainment. And a lot of people with white collar jobs who have been back in the office since well before hybrid was a thing. Doctors have to be in the office after all.
And big law firms and companies in the finance industry long ago told their teams they get paid a lot of money and they need to be in the office five days a week because that's how it was going to be. The tech companies are locked into ferocious battles for talented people who can pick up and leave at a moment's notice to go work down the street for someone else for just as much if not more money.
Tech has historically been known as the cool kids and they have the glass offices with the ping pong tables, the kombucha in the break room, the volleyball courts outside the bring your dog to work day and all those other great perks that Google made popular 30 years ago now. Right. All the other tech firms followed suit because they had to be cool and edgy in order to attract talent when there was the fight for tech talent and Silicon Valley and elsewhere.
Well law firms smaller organizations those firms aren't trying to get people back in the office because our offices are so cool and we need to be more collaborative and creative like we used to be. We're just saying people aren't being as productive we need people back in the office because they need to get back to work. People are doing laundry and they're going to coffee shops and they're not being as productive so the reason I'm noticing behind closed doors is different.
We have to take a quick break we'll get back. Here for this episode comes from AWS with the power of AWS generative AI teams can get relevant fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud. We're back with Professor Steven Meyer and workplace culture expert Jessica Krieger discussing return to office mandates.
Before the break you heard a few of the stated reasons why some big companies are pushing so hard to bring people back to the office it's about productivity it's about preserving culture and it's probably also quite a bit about control. And I've heard all of this when talking to CEOs on decoder a lot of them seem to agree that flexibility around remote work was key for the first couple of years the pandemic and while adjusting was difficult it was doable we made it work.
But some execs just don't think it's a great long-term strategy not for the business and not for the culture. For example we recently had do a lingo CEO Luis van on the show and he explained the do a lingo which is headquartered in Pittsburgh has workers back in the office three days a week without exceptions. I just wholeheartedly believe that you can work better that way.
Most of what we do not 100% but most of what we do is creative stuff is just a lot harder to do so over over slack and zoom you know it that kind of worked out for about nine months during the pandemic but it is actually impressive how you know when when the pandemic started we all had to go remote.
And we were executed pretty well towards the end of it our ideas had kind of run out. I mean we were executing the ideas but we kind of had run out of new ideas and it's pretty amazing as soon as we came back to the office within like three months you would just see like all these ideas popping up and it's because.
My God first of all you can't sit in front of a whiteboard and talk about stuff also there's you know we have lunch together here every day in the lunch line that you hear people being like hey I've been seeing a while I thought of saying this to you it's just something that you would never send a slack for. I think the combination of all this just makes it makes it a better company I don't have that much proof but I am extremely convinced of this.
That line about creative work is something we've heard from other big names in the industry Disney CEO Bob Iger used it last year when he said quote in a creative business like hours nothing can replace the ability to connect observe and create with peers that comes from being physically together nor the opportunity to grow professionally by learning from leaders and mentors.
Disney is now back in the office four days a week but some CEOs don't buy it and they are equally candid about it earlier this year I chatted with zoom CEO Eric Yuan zoom was obviously one of the big winners in the shift remote during the pandemic. It's business basically exploded overnight from 10 million users at the end of 2019 to more than 300 million just four months later but zoom as a company eventually went hybrid too.
Here's what Eric had to say about returned office and how company should focus instead on fostering connection among employees with off sites and other team building exercises which I goes a lot of what I heard from Stefan and Jessica. I do not think that people they wanted to get a more often in person but they want to occasionally get it together in particular for newly employees they want to start with in person interaction.
And afterwards you and I know already know each other very well for the future interactions we can go online right also the most the first time we met in person the future conversation will be will go online and also also want to meet in person maybe once or twice a year because we have so many employees living area you know and also in Florida in Texas right they also want to get together together once or twice a year I think that's good enough.
One conversation I've been thinking about a lot in this context is when I had in 2020 with Google CEO sooner or try right is the pandemic was in full swing at the time Google is fully remote and sooner made a similar argument about creative work like brainstorming and how important it might be for Google to reconsider its approach to remote down the line when the road maps were less clear.
Productivity is down in certain parts and what is not clear to me is in the first two months most of the people are already on projects in which they kind of know what they need to do but you know the next phase which will kick in is where let's say you're designing next years products and you know you're on a brainstorming phase things are more unstructured how does that collaboration actually work.
You know that's a bit hard to understand and do so we are trying to understand what works well and what doesn't here in 2024 it seems like Google is thinking about that dynamic more than ever according to a report from business insider when employees asked about the Amazon returned office mandate at a recent all hands meeting.
Google's VP of global compensation and benefits John Casey said hybrid wasn't going anywhere for now and soon our himself chimed in to remind employees to be productive on the days they were working from home the implication of course is a Google has the power to take away hybrid and remote flexibility if it wants to.
All right so that's what some big tech and media executives are saying about remote versus hybrid versus in office work but can we trust them is what they're saying really true here's Stefan and Jessica on whether it's actually the case that we're more creative or productive in person.
There is some data about some of the aspects of work we create more creativity so there is a study done by a colleague of mine at Columbia and she did with colleagues from Stanford did an experiment where people brainstorm over zoom and they brainstorm in person and they come up with more ideas in person turns out then they have to then they have a list of the best.
And then they have to decide which are like the best ideas that they can actually do online as well so I do think there is truth to that something in person works better but again is it 40 hours or whatever the work week looks like that we do that I don't think so because you can probably then also do studies are you being more focused.
When you can do it at home or in a big open floor office and you probably find it can probably be more focused when you're at home and they are pick like the time when you're most productive in doing so so there are certain tasks we do better at home and there is certain task we do better in the office and now we just have to figure out what is the right mix and manage that well I don't think that we need to for all the tasks that we do we need to be in person.
Even at Disney not all the tasks are like together coming up with great stories 40 hours a week.
I do think there is something to that I think being in person does do something to a working relationship that makes a little bit juicier well I don't know what the definition of juicy is but call it a vibe right everyone who's listening knows what I'm talking about something is different when you meet someone in person having said that take your real estate budget and make it a travel budget and some of that is a little bit more important.
So let's go to travel budget instead let people get together for really intensive three day thing every quarter rather than going into the office three days a week maybe or maybe not running into the person having all of the discomforts of going into the office and I think you can get maybe even a better result out of your people. Jessica makes a really important point there a lot of the tension in the remote versus in office debate comes from a lack of managerial effort and coordination.
Companies just aren't trying hard enough to figure out whether there's a better approach to hybrid that doesn't result in people sitting alone in the office on zoom calls instead is that we need to really start thinking both about the type of work we're doing and the context in which that work is done.
We should not think about jobs what do you think should think about tasks what am I doing in a given day on a day in a given week and there are certain tasks that work better alone deep focused work you don't get distracted you just prepare and you can do that whenever you're the most productive that for some people that's six o'clock in the morning and for some people that's 11 p.m. at night and some do that better in a coffee.
Shop and some do that better in their pajamas and that's what flexibility allows their other tasks that are better maybe together like having a brainstorming activity solving a really complicated or talking about a really sensitive issue that is probably better in person now do we do those in person things or that's what we're better in person 40 hours or 50 hours a week no
so now we have to rethink about like how can we organize a day that take advantage of like we're together or we give people flexibility and that requires a little bit of coordination because like I don't want to go to the office and be on a zoom call that's my nightmare going to the office to be in a zoom call is my personal nightmare or you go in there and it's half empty there is nothing less motivating because it's like deflate your area and you're not going to be in a zoom call because it's not going to be in a zoom call.
This is like deflate your area in a ginormous office and nobody's there that sucks so you want to make sure if you're there you actually do something that is with other people together remote days cannot look like in person days if they look the same yeah you're in zoom calls in the office and you're in meetings which should be in person at home and that just doesn't work you have to actually exploit the advantages of the environment.
There's not only the advantages of remote and the advantages of being in the office and stack it. There's still one really big question that's been looming over this whole discussion. One we hinted at right at the beginning. Layoffs and these returned to office mandates really about headcount reduction. So you're just going to tell it the answer is yes at least partially but companies will never say that out loud and while it may not be the primary reason these companies are
employees to come back in. It is certainly a beneficial side effect if you're a company that's looking to cut costs. Let me tell you the other real reason that people are doing this right for technology companies they were for the longest time in gather market share mode build and gather market share which requires an enormous amount of effort and people where we are building and we're gathering market share and we're growing
and we're getting the fastest pace possible so that we can be at the top of our game and these companies have now reached kind of the peak of that work they have built the thing now it's an iterative process of maintaining of improving and and continuing to grow incrementally which means they need a lot less people than they did in growth mode.
So we're scaling back there having layoffs I have spoken with the CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in the world who said our company will never be bigger than it is today. This is the biggest we will ever be from an employee headcount standpoint and from now on we will be getting leaner and we will be getting more efficient with less people and that's true for most tech companies.
They want to shed employees they over hired that was course corrected by the first round of layoffs that you saw last year but now they're just trying to get leaner and more effective and efficient and so they're going to continue to lay people off and this is a way to get people to leave without laying them off.
So where does that put Amazon as I mentioned at the top of the episode Amazon CEO Andy jassy had a response to claims from employees that his companies returned office mandate was a quote back door layoff.
According to CNBC jassy told Amazon employees at an all hands meeting that it was simply not true that the company wanted to reduce headcount or that it had made any deals with city governments to help boost local economies by bringing workers back into offices instead jassy said quote this was not a cost play for us this is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture.
That echoes what Amazon web services CEO Matt Garman said at a separate all hands meeting last month CNBC also reported that at that time Garman said quote we want to be in an environment where we are working together and we feel that collaborative environment is incredibly important for our innovation and our culture.
Garman claimed that nine out of 10 employees were excited about the return to work and that one key part of office culture that he was trying to revive was the ability to disagree and debate. And a pretty funny quote for anyone who's ever had to use Amazon's internal video conferencing tool Garman said quote I don't know if you guys have tried to disagree via a chime call it's very hard. We have to take a quick break will be back.
This episode comes from AWS with the power of AWS generative AI teams can get relevant fast answers to pressing questions and use data to drive real results power your business and generate real impact with the most experienced cloud. We're back with professor Stefan Meyer and workplace culture expert Jessica Krieger discussing why companies want people back in the office and what's next for hybrid and remote work.
Before the break you heard Jessica say that some companies are indeed looking at headcount reduction is one of the many reasons to push employees back into the office and that there's still just a lot of frustration and poor management leading companies to think they need to pull back from hybrid and remote work.
So how's this going to play out. I often look at this debate and get frustrated by the extremes it's either people telling me that full remote is the future or it's coming as like Amazon and other saying you have to come in five days a week. The choice is always presented as a binary. But Stefan thinks that ultimately hybrid is the way to go even if it leads to some painful trade offs like having to make tough decisions when and for how long to bring employees together for offsights.
Stefan thinks most companies will choose hybrid to get access to a larger more distributed pool of talent. I actually think that like most organizations will end up in hybrid and when you look at the data that's actually what turns out a lot of organizations doing that they don't do extremes one or the other and I know remote first companies who are doing just fine.
And I guess we're going to see companies that are all in the office and they're doing maybe your friends law firms are going to be doing fine when they do so but most organizations. I think will end up in a hybrid world where you actually get the benefit of those personal interactions but also the benefit of giving people flexibility and that deep focus time that they will have when they're at home. One of the big promises of being fully remote is that you have access to a larger talent pool.
You can hire people wherever they are across the country maybe even across the world and they can all come work for you and that's now every company globally competitive in a way that was really hard to be before. But if you're talking about hybrid and you're talking about coming in two or three days a week and being flexible and having these moments where you can just pull people in because you need them everyone still has to be in a range.
Right, you have to be somewhat available if not completely available is that pushing back against this notion that we'll just have a totally distributed workforce and pull talent from all these sort of non traditional tech cities. Yeah, I think that's the trade off when you do hybrid people have to work.
They live closer now if you only come into New York City three days a week you know you can maybe take a little longer commute on those three days and if you have to come five but you can't live in Sydney. Sydney might be hard because it's a different time zone but you can't like live and you know it's hard to live in upstate even upstate New York where we would have the same time zone so we can do a lot of synchronous work but not together in the office.
Yeah, I think that's the trade off and if it's for the organization really difficult to find talent in a location I think you might go for a very distributed workforce. You bring people together for like those retreats on steroids that there is group building and there is a lot of the trust building happens then in person.
You can do that people can fly in wherever for a week or two and then they go back to their work but it depends a lot like how hard is it to attract talent what talent you need. And then you trade off the upside of that we can access that much much larger talent pool does trade off so why just go ultimately disagrees.
I think that eventually we will all be working from home not next year but eventually it does feel inevitable to me hybrid has been shown to be one of the hardest models to implement effectively I do think that of all the models working from home 100% is the best and there are plenty of companies that are 100% remote many companies have made very great results with the company that's 100% remote.
These are highly successful being in the office five days a week right and then there of course those jobs where you have to be in the office or you have to be on the factory floor and those will always be you know in manufacturing for example you have to be there right. But hybrid has been very complicated for the reasons you talked about you go to the office to get on a zoom you go to the office and people picked a different day to go to the office and no one's there so hybrid is hard.
Being 100% one of the other is a little bit easier and I think that it'll take a while but eventually more people will be working from home than not it's absolutely true that you have a larger talent pool when your company is remote because you're pulling from a larger pool of people and so you can be more selective and get higher level talent right then if you're geographically. Landlocked so to speak so that's unequivocally true there's no argument against that I think moving forward.
This is the differentiator right I would love for the companies that our organization competes against to force people back into the office because this will become a differentiator for me then and for the job openings that I have that we are remote you can work from home come and apply over here don't go to our competitors they're going to make you go in the office five days a week and that also is a competitive edge in a differentiator just to be offering that I have been approached by a lot of organizations.
To move and take on other roles with better pay and you know more power more influence more whatever it is that everyone wants in their career and but you've got to go into the office five days a week and I said no thank you there's no way I just it's not part of my value system anymore and there are a lot of people like me.
What does seem very clear to me and what I heard from both Jessica and Stefan is that the idea that we can just turn back the clock to before the pandemic and do what we did before because it was easier and it's not going to happen the world is a different place now. Before the pandemic remote work was treated either as a luxury or something only a small handful of companies or startups could successfully pull off but after 2020 we all saw that it worked.
And as you'll hear both stuff in a Jessica say this isn't just a new way of doing things this is an entirely new reality one that can't just be undone. People got a taste of that it's actually possible and really nice to have also that flexibility so now pushing back from that new default is going to be really hard before the pandemic nobody actually thought about that hard.
Oh could we do hybrid there were like some really forward looking organizations were doing that most organizations were like we do five to we come five days away like every in the summer maybe you have like Friday afternoon off but very few were actually really being visionary about that but now we tasted it and I was like it's actually possible.
We have unlocked a new belief due to the experience of covid we all had an experience that was transformative for us in the way we think about work and where work can be done and how productive we can be at home and that's not going away right we know that now and if you think about the people who are forcing people back into the office and the language used around that it's quite telling.
Return return to office go back to the office those are regressive phrases that are about going backwards to the way that it was before covid they're acting like covid was a pause on normal and that now we can unpause and go back to normal as if it didn't completely transform our thinking in the nature of the global economy it did transform us now we are different we've been shaped to be different because of what was a global.
Catastrophic event that totally upended businesses and people's personal lives and so our new beliefs exist and so that is you know that's here to stay what's happened is a change a change in the nature of work and the companies that are trying to force people back into the office are not able to adapt they're trying to just go back to how it always has been and so those those are not the companies that I believe will win.
So what does that leave Amazon Jessica says she thinks of any of the companies that are requiring people to come back to the office Amazon is the one that will move the needle the most but in what direction we're going to wait and see. Justice says that Amazon is the kind of company that when it really comes down to it will adapt to whatever situation best suits the business.
I think there will be a seismic shift they have made a commitment in their executive closed doors meeting to take this to the limit Amazon has gone in the public eye has done media interviews has adamantly shared that this is happening and so I think they're prepared for the seismic shift that will happen as a result of that I think it's going to shake things up so I think they'll they'll go through with it I think something will shift I think we'll all see what that is and no one really knows what it is because this is.
The first of its kind and I think the other tech companies will follow based on how it goes with Amazon. I like to think stuff in and Jessica for joining me on Dakota and thank you for listening I hope you enjoyed it. If you have thought this episode and I'm sure you do you can email us at decoder at the verge.com we really do read all the emails you can also hit me up directly on threads I'm at reckless 1280.
We also have a tick tock check it out it's at Dakota products lot of fun so I'd like to cut her please share with your friends and subscribe wherever your podcast if you really like the show hit us with that five star review. Decoder is a production the version part of the box media podcast network our producers are Kate Cox next that our editors Cali Wright are supervising producers Liam James the Dakota music is my break master cylinder we'll see you next time.
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