The uncompromising way in which Amazon framed its recent return-to-office mandate grabbed the headlines but things have not gone entirely to plan for the US multinational. Its subsequent admission it couldn’t accommodate all its workers in some cities and reports of people ready to leave rather than comply, have highlighted the way in which the hybrid working model is still evolving as 2025 gets under way.
Chief executive Andy Jassy announced the move in mid-September, portraying it as a positive that would allow staff to collaborate better with each other. Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman struck a somewhat less upbeat tone when, after pushback from staff, he suggested anyone who did not want to come back five days a week should seek alternative employment.
It is, say observers here, just one high profile example of the way a complex post-pandemic hybrid working landscape is shifting.
Mary Connaughton, director of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development in Ireland, says the company’s decision is part of a much wider and more detailed assessment by employers of what works for them post-pandemic. Experience elsewhere suggests Amazon will lose some of its 4,000-strong workforce in Ireland as a result of the move, she suggests.
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“I think after the way so many companies had to jump into hybrid or remote working, there is certainly a lot more questioning going on,” she says. “They are asking whether the arrangements they have in place are allowing them to maximise innovation, collaboration and productivity, and in many places that is prompting a greater pull back to the office.
“But on other side of this, we are also seeing many employees stand their ground and say, ‘I’m not prepared to spend two hours a day commuting in order to spend eight at a desk doing exactly the same work I’ve been doing from home’.
It is still very challenging for businesses to find a model that suits everybody, including the company, and is deemed to be fair
— Trayc Keevans, global foreign direct investment director at Morgan McKinley
“In many cases, employees aren’t giving in just because there’s a little bit more pressure or because someone in head office in California thinks they should all be in work together. What we see is that when companies say, ‘okay, everyone back five days a week’, they lose people.”
Trayc Keevans, global foreign direct investment director at Morgan McKinley, agrees, saying flexibility in the workplace is still enough of a factor for people to consider cuts to pay or benefits in order to resist stricter return-to-office mandates. Companies are having to enhance workplace offerings in order to lure workers back.
“It is still very challenging for businesses to find a model that suits everybody, including the company, and is deemed to be fair,” she says. “A lot of them have been edging the number of days they want people back in upwards but they are also thinking more about which days they need particular teams back.”
Motivations for wanting to retain more flexibility are mixed, she suggests, and some are more straightforward than others to address. Tackling the resistance of young workers to return due to financial considerations, for instance, has prompted particular supports from some employers, she says.
“What we see now is younger workers in particular, because their pay tends to be lower, saying they don’t want to come back because of the expense involved and we do see some companies reacting to that. I know of one example, for instance, where an employer has opened a shop on-site and said ‘okay, we will provide you with the makings of breakfast, lunch, dinner, for free, so you won’t have to worry about that’.
“Employers are looking at those sorts of concerns and realising they may have to be addressed.”
Head of policy at the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, Laura Bambrick, welcomes any supports provided by companies to their staff but points to CSO figures published in November as evidence that all the talk of a mass return to the office is actually overblown, driven in part by a media and wider obsession in Ireland with the tech sector.
“What we see is that 80,000 more people were doing some work from home in 2024 than in 2023, although the whole issue is becoming more gendered, like part-time working, with women increasingly seeing it as an option for, in particular, young mothers or older women when they’re caring for a young child or a parent.”
Many employers, she says, continue to take a benign view of flexible working overall but she fears that might change if the economic climate does.
“I think that it will take a downturn to get a reliable temperature reading of how employers feel about remote because while we’re in a full employment situation, we’re really not going to get that.”
The drive by tech sector employers to bring people back in full-time has already prompted a handful of cases before the Workplace Relations Commission (WRC) on the right to request remote working, with various workers arguing that their employers should have been more sympathetic to the cases they had made.
At a recent Legal Island-run conference, Jennifer Cashman, head of employment law at RDJ, said the WRC’s position on the code of practice regarding the right to request remote working had been clear, that it would assess only whether employers had met the requirement to give serious consideration to requests, not the merits of the request itself.
“The WRC is not deciding whether the employer should have said yes or no to the request,” she said. “It is looking at whether the employer followed the provisions of the code in considering the request for remote or flexible working, and that is a very different consideration.
Many employers simply don’t have the space to accommodate everyone at the same time, in part because offices have been adapted to provide more suitable spaces for video calls and meetings
— Trayc Keevans, global foreign direct investment director at Morgan McKinley
“I suppose, as practitioners, we were somewhat concerned when the code was published, but the WRC decided the TikTok case [which concerned an employee who had relocated away from the office due to the availability of remote working during Covid and then sought to be exempted from a return-to-office mandate] exactly as the code provides,” she said.
The commission has taken a similar line in other cases pursued by those in the sector and all are understood to have been lost so far. Connaughton acknowledges the code has proven to be a disappointment to employees “and may need to be revisited or revamped”, although it seems unlikely that will happen before the two-year review already provided for.
In the meantime, Keevans points out that a more practical consideration is that many employers simply don’t have the space to accommodate everyone at the same time, in part because offices have been adapted to provide more suitable spaces for video calls and meetings.
Shane Duffy, office leasing director at Savills, says this is certainly a factor for some firms after a period in which a significant number also sought to sublet or dispose of space they felt they would not need again due to reduced on-site working.
“A lot of occupiers are looking for more meeting rooms, collaboration spaces, not just simply a large boardroom to cover 20 or 40 or 50 employees, but multiple different sizes, for as few as two people getting to collaborate or host team calls,” he says.
Making the spaces attractive to employees is also a factor with a greater emphasis being placed on attractive food and coffee areas as well as a growing number of fitness facilities, all of which requires more space.
The market, he says, remains in something of a transition period but it is adapting and he predicts that with so little construction in progress, the amount of available space will reduce significantly over the next few years.
That, though, is a longer term consideration. The safest prediction for 2025, it seems, is that the landscape will remain complex.
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