Day: October 8, 2025

• Ford ordered the majority of its employees back to the office four days a week in September.
• Before the new policy came in, some workers got emails warning they may be fired if they didn’t badge in more.
• Multiple employees said they got the emails despite complying with remote working rules at the time.

Ford is the latest company to crack down on working from home — and some employees say they’ve been told they could be terminated if they don’t comply.

In June, the Detroit automaker told employees that they would be required to come into the office four days a week from September 1, with Ford saying the move would help boost growth as the company battles to transform itself into an affordable EV powerhouse.

Since then, Ford has sent some employees emails telling them that they are not badging in enough and warning that they could face termination if they do not improve their attendance, three current and former Ford employees told Business Insider.

Two said they had received these emails despite complying with updated office attendance policies and having previous work-from-home arrangements signed off by their managers.

While many of Ford’s Michigan-based teams have been in the office three days a week since late 2024, other divisions maintained a more flexible approach to working from home, two current and former employees said.

In an all-hands for a team within Ford’s Enterprise Technology division — which oversees Ford’s IT services and internal digital tools — on September 9, human resources director Homer Isaac said the tone of the emails was designed to instigate a “change of behavior” around remote working.

In a recording of the all-hands viewed by Business Insider, Isaac said the fact that the enterprise technology division had previously had more lenient rules on remote working meant that some employees may have received the emails despite complying with pre-existing working-from-home arrangements.

He said that the company was aware that employees who had been “doing the things that you were supposed to” have been “caught up in a lot of that noise,” adding that workers who are complying with the new four-day-a-week rules should not be concerned about losing their jobs.

“Most of the company went back to three days a week back in the fourth quarter of last year. [Enterprise technology] had 13 days a quarter, and then progressed in August to three days a week, and now four days a week, which is the official policy in September,” said Isaac.

“The letters up to this point, quite honestly, were based on a window where our standard wasn’t the same as everybody else’s standard. The communications are standard, and I will pledge to this team, we have asked for those to be changed or modified — we have failed in that,” he said.

‘Flexibility is a two-way street’

In the days after Ford announced the return-to-office mandate on June 25, certain employees received an email saying that their badge data indicated their “on-site presence since April 2025 has averaged less than one day a week,” and was not in line with company expectations that hybrid workers come in three days a week.

These initial automated emails warned that not meeting these new expectations would be considered a “policy violation,” according to copies of the emails viewed by Business Insider.

One former Ford employee told Business Insider that despite their pre-June remote working arrangements being approved by senior management and complying with the three-day-a-week requirement, they continued to receive automated emails saying that their on-site presence had not improved.

These subsequent emails warned that failure to comply with the new policy of four days a week on-site from September would result in “discipline up to and including termination.”

“We need to work across time zones, and the new policy makes that impossible. People are working to the rule and are no longer willing to put in extra time outside normal hours. Flexibility is a two-way street,” said the employee, who recently left the company.

Another current Ford employee told Business Insider they had also received a similar email warning that failing to comply with the new remote working rules could result in termination, despite going into the office the required number of days.

“I’m tired and exhausted. I just want to do my job and help the company, but upper management is constantly making that harder to do, and then telling me I’m the problem,” they said.

A source with knowledge of the emails told Business Insider that some employees may have received one or more notices incorrectly.

They added that non-compliant employees were identified via an automated HR system that required managers to confirm whether they had taken vacation or sick leave, or if they had a pre-existing remote working agreement, before they were sent a warning.

A bumpy road to RTO

Like many companies, Ford’s return to office hasn’t been entirely smooth. Employees Business Insider spoke to mentioned teething problems and overcrowding, with one calling an RTO trial run in August “a little bit disastrous” due to a lack of desks and parking.

The employee said that the overcrowding issues have now been mostly “smoothed out,” but added that the way the process had been handled had hurt morale.

A source with knowledge of the situation said that limited parking had been an issue, with some employees forced to triple-park and Ford running a shuttle service for workers at some offices.

Hybrid IT employees were also told to begin coming into Ford’s Dearborn site three days a week on August 6, according to interviews with employees and an email viewed by Business Insider.

In comments posted on an internal Ford forum on that day, employees complained that the site’s Rotunda center had run out of parking and that police had shown up to ticket workers parked illegally. A Ford employee BI spoke to confirmed that police had attended.

Ford is opening a 2.1 million-square-foot new world headquarters in Dearborn in November. The company says it will have capacity for around 4,000 employees.

Last week, frustration over Ford’s return-to-office policy bubbled over in a highly public fashion when a number of meeting room displays at the company’s Dearborn site began displaying a crossed-out image of CEO Jim Farley with an explicit anti-RTO message.

“We have done everything we can to make sure our employees understand the in-office policy, and we have given everyone time to adjust their schedules and work with their managers to make sure they are in compliance,” a Ford spokesperson told Business Insider.

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• Dave Dama bootstrapped his e-commerce company in 2010. Today, he does eight figures in annual revenue.
• He believes Amazon is the best place to start a brand on a shoestring budget.
• His formula for success involves launching as many products as you can sustainably.

Dave Dama launched his first Amazon brand in 2010, when e-commerce entrepreneurs were just starting to figure out the platform.

“The competition and saturation weren’t there,” he told Business Insider. “You could really launch products in any category and see some success if you had an understanding of the platform, without ads, because the secret wasn’t out yet.”

The e-commerce veteran admits that selling on Amazon in 2025 is more complex and expensive, but he still believes it’s the best place to start a business.

“The beautiful thing about Amazon and why it allowed us to succeed is that it really lowers the barrier to entry and reduces overall risk,” he said. “If I were to set up a traditional retail store distribution channel, there are tremendous costs that come with building all that infrastructure out and hiring. Those costs are reduced 90%, if not more, by starting on Amazon.”

Dama and his business partner, Arsalan Rahbarpoor, bootstrapped their e-commerce business, which now does eight figures in revenue between their two brands: Pure Daily Care, which offers beauty and wellness devices for at-home use, and Aquasonic, which offers oral care products.

“You can start with 2,000 bucks, so what’s the worst that can happen?” encouraged Dama. “Amazon is a potential gold mine, and the first stop in your brand-building journey.”

He and his CMO, Jonathan Cohen, provided a playbook for succeeding on Amazon in 2025.

‘It’s a numbers game’: Launch multiple products

“If you want to become a hyper successful seller, it’s a numbers game,” said Dama — meaning, launch and list as many products as you can sustainably. Set the expectation that most of your products won’t take off, he added: “There’s a 90% plus chance of failure as you’re learning the platform and the process.”

The key is to at least break even, so you have the capital to continue testing different products.

That’s what worked for Dama and Rahbarpoor, whose first product flopped. Once they realized it wasn’t a winner, they lowered the price enough to sell through their initial inventory and then analyzed customer reviews to figure out what went wrong.

“How do you recoup that investment? How do you continue to have the ability to launch new products? Because if you launch enough new products, you will eventually have a stable of winning products and build a real business,” said Dama.

Optimize your listing page

Your listing page matters.

“It’s become more important just because of fierce competition,” said Dama. “You’re going up against hundreds of other options, so you need to set your listing apart by really investing in quality photos.”

If you don’t have the budget to hire a professional, your iPhone can go a long way. One top Amazon seller, who started her e-commerce business with $2,000 upfront, shot her initial product photos with her phone. She used GIMP, a free image editor, to paste her product images on a white background.

Dama added that eventually, you’ll have to pay for Amazon ads: “When I get on calls to mentor aspiring Amazon entrepreneurs, I tell them two things: A, you have to have an idea for which products you want to launch. And B, you need to master ads. Or, if you have the money, hire someone who knows the ad game. Because Amazon, at this point, is absolutely a pay-to-play platform.”

Think beyond Amazon

Once you’ve found what Dama likes to call “winning products,” it’s smart to think about leveraging other platforms.

“I think all Amazon sellers should be thinking about everything off Amazon — TikTok being one of the top things.”

TikTok Shop is the platform’s built-in e‑commerce feature, which allows users to discover and purchase products within the app. It officially launched in the US in 2023, and top Amazon sellers agree that succeeding in e-commerce in 2025 means at least exploring TikTok Shop.

Not every product is the right fit for the platform. In general, consumers on TikTok Shop are more price-conscious, explained Cohen: “It’s going to be really tough to get a TikTok shopper to buy a moisturizer for over $100 unless it’s the No. 1 spoken about moisturizer.”

While AquaSonic isn’t big on TikTok, Pure Daily Care has exploded on the platform, driven by one specific line of products — the NuDerma High Frequency Wands — that went viral during the COVID pandemic.

“We were in the right category at the right time at the right price point,” said Cohen. “It came at a time when people could not go and visit their facialist or their aesthetician to get a treatment, so everyone was looking to social media and influencers to tell them what to do with their skin.”

It’s worth experimenting with the platform, especially if you’ve started to gain steam on Amazon.

“The creators are making content that they think resonates with their users, but also that they hope and know is going to convert — and that tends to be the stuff that already sells well. So, if you’re an Amazon seller that has a popular product that gets a lot of customer feedback and moves fairly well, you should absolutely be on TikTok and formulating your strategy,” said Cohen. “Even if your TikTok shop is just an experiment to see what happens, you wouldn’t know unless you get on there.”