Leaked: Whole Foods CEO tells staff he wants to turn Amazon’s RTO mandate into ‘carrot’ — All-hands meeting offered vague answers to many questions, and failed to explain how five days in office would fix problems that three days in-person couldn’t
https://fortune.com/2024/10/02/leaked-whole-foods-ceo-meeting-amazon-5-day-rto-office-policy/
27 Comments
> “freedom within a framework of a norm of an office based culture” was one phrase from a Whole Foods marketing exec that especially rankled employees
“Sometimes I’ll start a sentence and I don’t know where it’s going. I just hope to find it somewhere along the way.”
Excerpts from [article](https://fortune.com/2024/10/02/leaked-whole-foods-ceo-meeting-amazon-5-day-rto-office-policy/) by Jason Del Rey:
*[…] “I want us to figure out how do we find the win-win overall in supporting Whole Foods Market, our team members, our customers and beyond,” Buechel said in the all-hands meeting on Tuesday, a recording of which was reviewed by Fortune.*
*“Our goal here is not to make this seem like this is a stick,” he added. “We want to help create and work with our team members [in] having the carrot and getting the excitement about bringing back the culture and ultimately the interactions that we once had in our offices across the company.”*
*Buechel said that his leadership team fielded 1,200 questions in advance of the meeting, which lasted a little less than an hour. Three employees attending the meeting in-person were also given the mic to ask questions.*
*The town hall comes two weeks after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that his company, which bought Whole Foods in 2017, would return to a full five days in office on January 2, 2025, after nearly five years of remote and hybrid work at Amazon and its subsidiaries.*
*[…] Among the other queries employees had for management were questions about why Whole Foods workers should have to follow Amazon’s mandate when their compensation doesn’t always match of their parent company counterparts, to whether the move was intended to force staff out, to how leadership plans to deal with a potential brain drain.*
*Leadership offered vague answers to many questions — “freedom within a framework of a norm of an office based culture” was one phrase from a Whole Foods marketing exec that especially rankled employees — and failed to explain how five days in office would fix problems that three days in-person couldn’t.*
*But Buechel was adamant that the mandate was not meant as an alternative to layoffs and that there would be flexibility to work from home when requiring quiet time to hit a deadline or if an unexpected personal need requires it.*
Boils down to
‘Because fuck you, that’s why’
CEOs will literally doing anything to make themselves look busy and feel important
Edit: read the article the discussion is about going from 3 days a week onsite to 5 days. The CEO has no insight on what is best and middle management and employees are telling him 3 days works great. Yet the CEO is demanding 5 days on site
I’m pretty sure if my company tried to force us back into the office 5 days a week we’d lose most of our IT department cos they’d just leave
“We want this to be a carrot not a stick”
Translation
“Why don’t you just agree that this is the best thing and give up your freedom”
Anytime CEOs push return-to-office policies, it’s for one or both of two reasons:
1) The CEO is highly narcissistic. CEOs tend to be pretty high up the spectrum of narcissistic grandiosity, and such people need others in their proximity they can dazzle with how “amazing” they are.
2) The company is in financial trouble, and knows that return-to-office mandates will up attrition, which is easier (and often cheaper) to manage than lay-offs/redundancies.
>*“freedom within a framework of a norm of an office based culture”*
When bad things happen to perfectly good words.
Of course the CEO can’t answer the questions because Andy Weasel Jassy hasn’t given any data either. So how do you defend the indefensible? With word salad, of course!
Two days a week in the office is all you need. Everything else is just trying to justify your shitty real estate investment.
Maybe the employees working at all those Whole Foods stores should push for WFH, too.
I gotta say, those are CEO eyes. Fucking nuts.
Yeah all hands are next to useless. It’s just theatre to give the impression to employees that their voices are heard.
Companies do this when the labor market is right.. when attrition becomes a problem and talent loss is too high then they’ll suddenly be supportive and kind.
It’s going to be scary when AI and automation can replace most people. Companies will slash and cut and won’t give a fuck.
Problem is wfh is the best carrot.
These are all about corporate control and long term building leases. Pathetic.
I’m not sure the metaphor of dangling a carrot in front of a work animal is really the vibe they should be going for
Probably paying too much for rent and need to justify it.
> Buechel touted initiatives such as an “office experience task force” during a special meeting to address the RTO policy.
Fucking just kill me already.
It’s literally grown ups needing to see their minions everyday to pump up their own self worth… meanwhile they’re leaving for lunch and going to do whatever with the rest of their days
Damn, whereas we are leaning harder into WFH. We are closing our corporate headquarters in the middle of nowhere and setting up a small space in NYC where our CEO lives with a handful of offices and a few bigger conference rooms for board and departmental meetings. My department already only had about 10% max in our home office
What carrot? They’re offering no benefit to employees to comply. Just do it or get fired – there is no carrot
>But Buechel was adamant that the mandate was not meant as an alternative to layoffs and that there would be flexibility to work from home when requiring quiet time to hit a deadline
Sounds like an admission that WFH is more efficient
Todays CEO have no clue what they’re doing. They are the ultimate conmen. Pay me 1/10 his salary, and I too can watch the news and copy some other CEO who copied some other CEO.
Carrot?
It’s about corporate tax breaks too. I’m sure someone at the city level threatened to reduce their tax break unless they get butts in seats.
CEOs everywhere still think they can put the remote genie back in the bottle. You’d have to undo the internet for that to fully work
CEOs can’t get replaced by AI fast enough