Comment by Olreich

Amazon has yet to share any of that internal data with its internal employees or the outside world. The only reasoning shared has been vague talk about energy being higher and culture being easier to spread. There is a lot of money to be saved and a lot of initiatives that would benefit from broad embracing of WFH by Amazon.

They claim to support improving DEI for neuro-divergent and mobility-impaired folks, where WFH would be a massive improvement in their ability to contribute without being required to commute into the office which might present challenges for them.

They claim to support sustainability and achieving carbon neutrality, but forcing employees into the office burns significant fossil fuels and puts wear on vehicles and increases pollution since the majority of the workforce winds up driving a car to work. They will increase this measurable impact by 60%+ by mandating another 2 days of office-work per week.

Much more likely, there are motives to doing this change that are not aligned with data and stated goals. That could either mean nefarious goals or lacking data. But it's more likely nefarious goals, since WFH didn't seem to be hurting anything according to all the data anyone has been able to tell. I'd expect someone to be able to come up with plausible ways that WFO is better than WFH in a data-oriented manner, but it really does seem to be down to personal preference for individuals on how they like to work. Who knows, maybe Andy Jassy really likes to work in-office and thinks that anyone saying they don't is lying and lazy. We have as much evidence for that as everything else that's been conjectured.