☠️ Dead Sea Effect: Amazon’s Risk of Losing Top Performers

Hello! 👋 

It’s Thursday, 3rd October, and I’m excited to be in your inbox. Over the past two weeks, the return-to-office mandate from a prominent blue-chip company has sparked intense debate. Social media has been buzzing with discussions around talent exodus, soft firings, commercial real estate, and private equity ties. I am also guilty of that.

However, today I want to dig deeper into something even more intriguing that decisions like this can trigger — the Dead Sea Effect.

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Key Idea: Dead Sea Effect

The Dead Sea, a hyper-saline lake in West Asia, is renowned for its extreme salt concentration and the fact that it's the lowest point on Earth's land. Water can only escape the Dead Sea through evaporation, leaving behind layers of salt—eight times more than in the ocean. As a result, the sea can no longer sustain life, earning it the name "Dead Sea."

This natural phenomenon provides a striking metaphor for organizations. Imagine an organization divided into two groups of employees:

1. The high-performers - those who are ambitious, talented, and known for their efficiency, and

2. The average employees who do just enough to meet their responsibilities without much enthusiasm.

When the work environment deteriorates, the most talented employees are often the first to leave. They have options, so they don't hesitate to seek better opportunities. Meanwhile, the average or disengaged employees tend to stay because they either lack alternatives or are content to remain in a comfort zone.

This creates what Bruce F. Webster, an American lecturer and programmer, coined as the "Dead Sea Effect," a situation where organizations gradually lose their best talent and retain the mediocre, much like the Dead Sea loses water but retains salt.

Webster described this as an anti-pattern.

In the context of the Dead Sea Effect, the anti-pattern occurs when poor organizational practices cause a "drain" of the most skilled employees, leaving behind a workforce of lesser motivation and competence. This can be devastating to the company’s culture, innovation, and overall performance.

Why does it matter?

When underperforming employees are truly underperforming, the result is an organization or department that struggles to achieve anything meaningful and consistently fails to retain talent.

The immediate consequence of the Dead Sea Effect is high turnover, leading to constant gaps that require new hires, ongoing recruitment efforts, and frequent role changes to cover lost ground. However, this is just the beginning—the ripple effects go much deeper.

The Dead Sea Effect can cripple an organization in several ways:

• Decline in Work Quality: As the most skilled employees leave, the overall quality of work declines. Those who remain often lack the expertise or initiative to maintain high standards.

• Innovation Stagnation: With fewer talented employees, the organization’s capacity for innovation dwindles, leading to a stagnation of new ideas and fresh approaches.

• Increased Dependence on Less Skilled Employees: Over time, the remaining employees may become entrenched in critical roles. Despite their limited skills, they become indispensable because no one else understands the systems or processes as well as they do, creating a dangerous dependency.

• Negative Work Environment: The absence of high performers often leads to a demoralized and complacent culture. A poor work environment further discourages top talent from joining or staying, creating a self-reinforcing cycle.

• Lower Productivity: The overall productivity drops as the remaining workforce lacks motivation and competence to drive projects forward efficiently.

• A Talent Drain That Becomes Harder to Reverse: As more skilled employees leave, the talent pool becomes increasingly weak. Less capable employees are often less motivated to seek out new responsibilities or share innovative ideas, and they stick around because they’re content with the status quo, even if the environment is toxic.

Ultimately, companies stuck in the Dead Sea Effect retain the “salt” of the workforce—those who are comfortable with a mediocre work environment, clocking in and out without any drive for change. The result is stagnation, both in culture and performance.

Putting this in context of Amazon

Amazon’s recent return-to-office mandate is a textbook case of an anti-pattern. It seems like a reasonable solution to certain operational challenges, but it’s poised to do more harm than good.

The dead sea effect is clearly visible here. A recent Blind survey of 2,500 Amazon employees shows:

• 91% are dissatisfied with the mandate

• 73% are actively considering leaving

• Candidates are dropping out of the recruitment process in droves

Top talent, particularly those who value flexibility and are well-positioned to find opportunities elsewhere, will likely be the first to leave. This is exactly how the Dead Sea Effect takes root. Even if the return-to-office mandate is a subtle strategy to reduce headcount without offering severance packages, it’s nearly impossible for Amazon to predict which employees will resign. And those departures may be the most valuable people—the innovators, the leaders, the high-performers.

Here are some public examples that illustrate this shift.

• After six and a half years at Amazon, a Senior Product Marketing Manager resigned due to a shift from customer obsession to profit-driven decisions under Andy Jassy. Despite a remote-work exception, the latest return-to-office mandate and lack of value for individual contributions prompted the decision. The silence from leadership, even during personal hardships like a hurricane, solidified the move. [Link]

• A senior strategic insights consultant quit to join a remote-first company. Initially working from home, the policy change in 2023 required him to commute weekly to HQ2 in Virginia, causing significant strain on his personal life. Despite adapting to hybrid work at his own expense, the push for a five-day in-office requirement forced him to prioritize his family's well-being. [Link]

Final Thoughts

The Dead Sea Effect isn’t just a theoretical concept; it’s a cautionary tale. For companies like Amazon, the stakes are high. The decision to push employees back into the office may inadvertently trigger an exodus of talent, leaving behind a less capable, less motivated workforce.

Location is irrelevant when it comes to producing great work, and we also have Nike’s example to prove this. This highlights a growing disconnect between rigid office mandates and actual business outcomes, as talent and productivity continue to shift towards more flexible work environments. Despite enforcing a return-to-office policy, the company has been unable to stop its stock from plummeting. Maybe Amazon can take a leaf out of Nike’s book.

Retaining talented employees is not just about offering higher pay or better perks; it’s about creating a work environment where top performers thrive, are engaged, and feel valued. Amazon’s decision to prioritize a rigid return-to-office strategy risks creating a Dead Sea of its own — a stagnant pool of disengaged employees left behind as the best talent evaporates.

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Curated Reads

Handpicked news, articles, and expert opinions - crafted just for you.

A. CEOs who insist workers return to the office are living in an 'echo chamber' [Business Insider]

Return to Office has nothing to do with the evidence. It often has nothing to do with the performance and who's a really good worker or innovative or coming up with great ideas. It all has to do with confirmation bias.

B. Philadelphia’s office buildings have lost over $1 billion in assessed value [Inquirer ]

Philadelphia’s Center City office buildings have lost over $1 billion in assessed value due to reduced demand from hybrid work and rising vacancies. The trend is expected to continue in 2025 with a number of lease renewals coming up.

C. Microsoft exec reassures staff there’s no plan for Amazon-style RTO [Microsoft]

Microsoft is not planning a return-to-office mandate as long as productivity does not dip. Something tells me that had productivity dipped with flexible work, we would not even be having this conversation today.

D. Hybrid work is not the future, says Meta’s former director of remote work: It’s an ‘illusion of choice’ [Yahoo Finance]

Mandatory office attendance, “the crux” of hybrid plans, is more sinister than it looks, and most workers don’t acknowledge how central they are. By mandating any amount of time in the office, companies remove many potential benefits for the employee and much of the benefit for the company. is the only option that actually gives workers choice.

E. Digital overload: Why women are doing a hidden form of work [BBC]

In relationships, women also do more of the hidden labor – the anticipating, planning and organizing of the tasks that helps family life function. It creates a substantial mental workload at the intersection of cognitive and emotional labor. Less obvious is the fact that technology is exacerbating this, putting women at risk of digital overload and even burnout.