Amazon Mandates 5-Days-a-Week RTO, Others to Follow

A few weeks ago Amazon changed the game in remote work. It announced that, effective 1 Jan 2025, all workers would have to report to the office 5 days a week. It's a major change from the company's previous 3-day-a-week RTO policy. Employees are unsurprisingly unhappy about it. Various surveys show they gave it a satisfaction rating of 1.3 on a 1-5 scale (1 being the lowest) and that 73% are considering quitting to work elsewhere.

Elsewhere may be a dwindling choice, though. When a major company with enormous cachet like Amazon makes a move like this, others will follow— others not just in the technology industry but across all industries. Indeed, Dell made a similar change for at least some of its employees already. After a 3-day-a-week policy announced months ago, Dell upped it to 5 days a week for its sales staff two weeks after Amazon's announcement.

Some leaders couch this change in terms of "Back to normal", like they're simply undoing the unique adaptions we were all forced to make during the urgent conditions of the Coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic didn't create remote work; it merely increased the number of people who performed it. 5-day-a-week RTO is not just going back to how things were in 2019, it's actually a regression back many, many years.

Companion Pass Earned. New Plan for A+.

I've just requalified for Companion Pass with Southwest Airlines. What is Companion Pass? It's a unique level of elite status at Southwest Airlines in which I designate one person as my companion who can join me on any flight I take almost for free. (More details in a blog I wrote a few years ago.) It's one of the best deals in the airline loyalty world— if you can reach it, and if you can use it.

Companion Pass (CP) requires a steep 135,000 qualifying points. There are a number of ways to earn these CPQPs: from flights on Southwest, from spending with partners such as rental car agencies, from spending on Southwest's affiliated credit cards, and from sign-up bonuses on credit cards. Reaching 135k solely on flying is pretty tough. I've done 2 or 3 times in the past 10 years. Most of the time I've made it with the help of some credit card action. This year I got a big boost, 60k CPQPs, from meeting the sign-up bonus on a credit card I opened in August.

This year, like each of the past several years, I've kept a spreadsheet of my progress toward elite status on Southwest. Yes, a spreadsheet! If it's important to reach because it's valuable, then it's important to track. The spreadsheet is not just to track what I've already done but also to forecast what's ahead— so I can adjust my plans to ensure I renew valuable elite status levels.

At the middle of the year this year I wasn't sure if I'd re-earn top tier statuses with Southwest. ...Yes, I just wrote statuses, plural. In addition to Companion Pass, there's also A-List Preferred ("A+"), which is more like a traditional elite status that confers early boarding privileges, separate lines for customer service, and bonuses on miles earned. And around June this year I wasn't sure I'd make either one. Thus I adjusted my plans.

My plan for earning CP was to boost my CPQPs with that credit card sign-up bonus. I was already earning a lot of points from flights this year, just not enough to surpass the 135k threshold with confidence. Now that that 60k bonus is in, I'm well over the 135k.

My plan for earning A+ was to see if something special happens. I know, hope is not a strategy! 😅 But Southwest has offered bonuses to help people earn elite status faster late in the year the past few years. I figured I'd wait until around September to see if a late-year offer materialized. That was my Plan B. If nothing materialized, I'd make a Plan C. Well, Southwest did come through with an offer! The offer doesn't make it a cake-walk to get to A+ but it does make it feasible with the remaining number of trips and likely trips I'll make this year. I probably won't cinch A+ until sometime in December but I'm now about 90% confident I can do it.