This week, Amazon announced that as of January it will be requiring all employees to work from the office five days a week—ending their hybrid work program.

This affects engineers and others whose work can be done offsite—not those on package assembly lines or delivery workers. Amazon says they are doing this to “strengthen the company culture.”

I don’t get it. Amazon thrived during the pandemic with employees working from home. What went wrong since then? And will the culture magically be strengthened by requiring everyone to spend time commuting to work and sitting in a cube all day, then spending even more time in Seattle traffic to get home?

I spent 15 years at Sun Microsystems. Never during that time did I belong to a work team that had all of its employees in the same physical time zone—let alone all in the same building. It never stopped us from dominating our market space for years. People either got the culture, or they didn’t. And if they didn’t, they didn’t last.

Too much bad behavior is blamed on cultural issues, and too many arbitrary decisions are handed down in the name of culture. Meanwhile, management makes vapid promises about work-life balance, without realizing how they are upending the lives of their people.

If Amazon has a problem with the culture, they should dig deep to figure out what is causing the issue and deal with it. I highly doubt it’s not seeing your colleagues in the break room every morning, every day of the week.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts productivity, as well as retention. Handing employees an F on home work is likely to result in valued employees deciding there are better cultures than this one.

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