Want to Lose Talent? Try a 5-Day RTO: Sarah Green Carmichael

Five days a week. That’s the new return-to-office policy at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post and at Amazon.com Inc., the retail giant now run by his designated successor Andy Jassy. It’s also the RTO recommendation Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have announced for the US federal government.

It’s a terrible way to manage talent. It seems obvious that these unpopular policies are a way to spur employees to quit, in a kind of “self-deportation” version of layoffs — but without severance payouts, health insurance continuance or WARN Act notification periods. That may sound appealing to some employers, but they should recognize which workers ...