When Amazon told employees in 2024 they’d need to be in the office five days a week instead of three, over 90% were unhappy with that change and more than 70% were thinking about quitting. Dell, JPMorgan and others made similar moves, some going as far as tying promotions to in-office attendance. These companies framed their decisions around culture, collaboration and productivity but for many workers that wasn’t the issue.  

In a recent Harvard Business Review article, Anne-Laure Fayard and John Weeks argue this backlash reflects a rupture in the "psychological contract”—an unspoken agreement between employer and employee about what each owes the other. It’s not written into a handbook, but it shapes how people work. And then expectations are upended without real conversations or care, employees start to disengage.  

Part of the problem is that these unspoken contracts are rarely acknowledged until they’re broken. During the pandemic, many people restructured their lives under the assumption that flexibility was here to stay. So, when return-to-office mandates arrived, especially with little warning or space for negotiation, they felt less like operational decisions.  

However, the issue isn’t just with remote workers, it’s with how decisions are made and communicated. Executives often lean on fairness as a one-size-fits-all principle: setting the same rule for everyone. But employees have started asking different questions about personal values and whether their workplace aligns with that.  

Fayard and Weeks suggest that rebuilding trust requires a shift from what they call an “ethics of justice” to an “ethics of care.” That means considering context, showing relational empathy and being transparent about why policies exist. Some companies are trying this already—offering hybrid flexibility, designing policies around worker input or making space for managers to adapt to individual team needs.  

They describe this shift as a move away from a shared sense of purpose toward a more individualized sense of what’s fair. When that fairness feels violated, even implicitly, employees react. Today, disagreement is about what both sides believe they signed up for and who gets to rewrite the terms.