Amazon Employees Plead For Reversal of 5-Day RTO Mandate in Anonymous Survey (fortune.com) 89
An anonymous reader shares a report: Some Amazon workers are refusing to "disagree and commit," as one of the company's famed leadership principles requires of those who aren't on board with a decision. Instead, hundreds of the online retailing giant's employees are complaining that CEO Andy Jassy's five-days-per-week return-to-office mandate, announced last week, will negatively impact their lives -- and productivity at work -- and how they hope the company will reverse course.
The feedback is from an anonymous survey created by Amazon employees that was viewed by Fortune on Tuesday. Corporate employees have shared it widely via the messaging app Slack, including in one "remote advocacy" Slack channel with more than 30,000 members that a former employee created when Amazon first announced a three-day return-to-office mandate last year. As a result, employees who are in favor of remote or hybrid work may have been more likely to respond to the survey and therefore skew the findings.
As of the afternoon of September 24, the average satisfaction rating related to the RTO mandate among survey respondents was 1.4 out of scale up to 5 (with 1 meaning "strongly dissatisfied" and 5 representing "strongly satisfied"). The survey's creators said in an introduction to their questionnaire that they plan to aggregate and share the results by email with Jassy and other company executives "to provide them with clear insight into the impact of this policy on employees, including the challenges identified and proposed solutions."
The feedback is from an anonymous survey created by Amazon employees that was viewed by Fortune on Tuesday. Corporate employees have shared it widely via the messaging app Slack, including in one "remote advocacy" Slack channel with more than 30,000 members that a former employee created when Amazon first announced a three-day return-to-office mandate last year. As a result, employees who are in favor of remote or hybrid work may have been more likely to respond to the survey and therefore skew the findings.
As of the afternoon of September 24, the average satisfaction rating related to the RTO mandate among survey respondents was 1.4 out of scale up to 5 (with 1 meaning "strongly dissatisfied" and 5 representing "strongly satisfied"). The survey's creators said in an introduction to their questionnaire that they plan to aggregate and share the results by email with Jassy and other company executives "to provide them with clear insight into the impact of this policy on employees, including the challenges identified and proposed solutions."
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No, force them to fire you. If you have money, hire a lawyer and have him look for any excuse. It doesn't take a lot of viable lawsuits to make a mess.
If that doesn't work, air company dirty laundry to the press.
Re: Quit (Score:2)
Re: Quit (Score:5, Insightful)
"damage Amazons corp culture" lol, it's beyond damaged. Insane growth is seen as the bare minimum performance goal. Not healthy by any stretch. Will be interesting to see if it collapses before DOJ breaks it up. It chews ppl up and eventually it runs out of people. WFH gave them a far bigger pool of applicants, this restricts it significantly.
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The only issue is that some of the high performers will get caught in the crosshairs
There are exceptions to the 5-day-RTO policy for important employees.
Re: Quit (Score:2)
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"hire a lawyer and have him look for any excuse"
Like, you didn't show up? Isn't that generally a core requirement for every job?
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Better yet, quit en masse and FOUND a company better to your liking. Could probably even get a several million dollar kickstarter going for it if you handed out Prime style shipping for investing in the company.
Re: Who is in charge over there??? (Score:2)
The term youâ(TM)re looking for is indentured servitude
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The term youâ(TM)re looking for is indentured servitude
The defining characteristic of indentured servitude is that you can't quit.
Amazon employees can quit.
Most jobs require employees to come to work and do what their boss tells them.
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The term youâ(TM)re looking for is indentured servitude
The defining characteristic of indentured servitude is that you can't quit.
Amazon employees can quit.
Most jobs require employees to come to work and do what their boss tells them.
It is a really simple thing. If I don't want to do something that is required in my work, I can either quit, or be terminated. Seems pretty simple.
Just like any other job requirement.
If a person has a personal requirement of only working from home, they can only take jobs that they never have to leave the house.
A word to the wise however - if you are one of those people who will never show up in a workplace, there are many people across the globe who can do what you are doing. So if this is your de
Re: Who is in charge over there??? (Score:2)
Form A Union (Score:1)
This. (Score:5, Insightful)
If you want to stop the endless cycle of losing everything every few years when Wall Street fires you so they can get a short term stock bump then you need bargaining power.
And you're not a billionaire, so you're not gonna get it from money. Numbers is the only way.
Last resort (Score:5, Interesting)
Would you want your company staffed by people who came to work there as a last resort? That seems to be what Amazon is angling for, people who couldn't land anyplace else, or people they had to pay a premium to toe the line. If that's what the biz really wants then I guess that's what it gets.
Re: Last resort (Score:2)
Re: Last resort (Score:4, Insightful)
the Amazon headquarter is really nice
I am sure it is "nice," especially if you have $2 million to afford to live within an hour's drive.
But no mattter how "nice" the office is, my home is nicer.
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Re:Last resort (Score:4, Insightful)
People hired there almost half a decade ago? Given their turnover, a lot of their high achievers that have joined in the last 4 (almost 5?) years, who should be the next generation of managers and directors there, are going to end up leaving. It Might not hurt them today, but the long term prospect for a healthy management layer there is grim to none.
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Perhaps companies founded since Covid will be more friendly to remote work.
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Would you want your company staffed by people who came to work there as a last resort? That seems to be what Amazon is angling for, people who couldn't land anyplace else, or people they had to pay a premium to toe the line. If that's what the biz really wants then I guess that's what it gets.
A few of the comments by Amazon folks on that website read like, "I am just in that job for the paycheck, nothing more." They appear to treat these high-paying, and probably high responsibility roles like a "McJob". Not an attitude that I can respect.
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I agree, and I can only say that their attitude is likely derived from the attitude management has exhibited towards them. Not to be cliché but 'company culture' might finally be appropriate here.
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So you are saying it is a 2-way street?
One party decides to act that way because they think the other party is acting tht way, and vice versa?
How does a situation like that come to an end?
Expecting one side to "give in" while letting the other side gets to "skate" is generally considered unacceptable by the party that has to "give in".
I honestly don't have an answer to this problem that the /. "my way or F-U" mob would find acceptable.
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Like all things in business, it is a negotiation.
If you, as a worker, offer more than the next person, you can negotiate for more money or additional privileges such as work-from-home because you are worth more. If you are just another cog in the machine, you will have to give up something in order to get the work-from-home benefit: maybe money, maybe choice of assignments, maybe future promotion opportunities... but you don't get something for nothing.
It applies to the business as well. If your good empl
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Solidarity (Score:3, Insightful)
Solidarity is key here.
One or two members on a team they can replace.
If the entire team declines then good luck replacing them all.
Disasters would ripple through $AMZN for years.
"IT folks need to grow a pair," is oft heard.
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Would you want your company staffed by people who came to work there as a last resort?
They don't care. If you are there, you will do what they say or you will no longer be there. They think that is all they need.
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Would you want your company staffed by people who came to work there as a last resort? That seems to be what Amazon is angling for, people who couldn't land anyplace else, or people they had to pay a premium to toe the line. If that's what the biz really wants then I guess that's what it gets.
I would want my company to have its employees to do what is required of them. Would you want a company where people pick and choose what they will or will not do? If the job is 8-5, so an employee can say. "I'm coming in at 10 o'clock, and working until 2:25 - I will not work the hours you demand" or I will not dress in an office dress code, I will wear old shorts and a dirty T-Shirt", or "I will not sign my time card." and so on This is a job requirement, nothing more, nothing less.
What is actually going on? (Score:2, Interesting)
I've had a job all through COVID. There was maybe a month or so of working from home when things were really uncertain, but we're a factory and all the plant floor employees had to be there, and it was important for support to have people onsite, so I mostly worked in the office. Working from home had certain benefits (commuting, being able to focus on certain tasks) but also clearly had detrimental problems, like younger employees were kind of left to flounder. And don't discount the benefits of just be
Re:What is actually going on? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have a job that requires you to be in the office, fine. But Amazon tech workers don't.
1. It's a lot quieter at home. I've worked in open offices most of my career (game companies are incredibly stingy with floor space) and it's nice to be able to work without having to wear headphones all day long.
2. I don't have a commute. When I lived in Montreal, I lived a 15 minute walk away from my office, but that's still more than an hour a day I spent walking. It wasn't all bad--I was walking in a nice part of town and I would do errands on the way, but now, I can get up and get my coffee and be at my desk for a 7:45am meeting without much fuss. I can also go to an early-morning or early-afternoon swim practice and still be on time/leave on time.
3. 80% of my communication AT THE OFFICE was over text messaging or email. The change to 100% remote doesn't actually change my communication burden. I put in an effort before, and I put in an effort now. The difference is that I work MORE CLOSELY with people across different time zones, from PST to EST to GMT. Because we're all doing it online, we actually schedule in our collaboration now.
My job started on-premises, but it turns out that was never actually a requirement, it was just the way things were always done. For many of us, this is a better way to work, and so being shown that you can be productive working from home and then being told to come back in for no reason other than a managerial power trip is galling.
Also, I think it's important to remember that despite the fact that Bezos walked away a billionaire, it's still the labour that makes Amazon all its money. I hope those tech workers stick to their guns and show Amazon that if you lose/fire a huge portion of your workforce, it's actually going to COST you money. Even if you manage to hire replacements for everyone that left, you've got a gap in institutional knowledge and you have to retrain all of them.
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My last job was in a "cubicle land" type of office, like you see in the movie Office Space. There are generally accepted ways to behave in that space. If you want to "carry on", go to the break room or the coffee station, both are away from the cubicles.
I once remember some youngin' engineer types carrying on in the aisle near me. Being a top-level senior engineer in the company I simply looked outside of my cubicle at them and they got the message - "Be professional and take it elsewhere".
They all knew tha
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Intentionally starting a loud conversation about personal matters on a regular basis in an open office area where people are actively working on hard problems is not some altruistic miracle - you're being a dick.
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Seriously, get therapy before your office mates poison your coffee.
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But if you started as an intern, why do people think they can become executives?
Re:What is actually going on? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: What is actually going on? (Score:2)
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A soft layoff... (Score:2)
When "trips to the grocery" seemed perilous, telecommuting worked for mgmt. Now that it's not a question of keeping employees alive, it's a lever to reduce headcount.
I'm a server guy, so WFH seems totally logical, but let's also not forget recently:
Dell: "If you continue to tele, you can't get promoted."
70% of staff: "Hmm. Works for me."
For Corporate Overlords, that's not a good look.
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isn't it obvious?
the world found out that most people can do their jobs from home equally or most of the time even better, and saves them about 1-2 hours a day in dressing up, driving, getting ready and so on. also, saving money in car maintenance, gas, laundry, clothing and more.
management hates it, because means letting go of some control.
eventually, the market will decide who is right.
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the world found out that most people can do their jobs from home equally or most of the time even better... management hates it, because means letting go of some control.
I'm sure that at least some managers hate it because it highlights that either they're superfluous, or they actually decrease the productivity of the folks who report to them.
Re:What is actually going on? (Score:5, Insightful)
So what's the real reason people are refusing to return to the office?
1. They've gotten used to the flexibility of being able to do things on weekdays. An awful lot of businesses aren't open except on weekdays, and it's a pain in the backside to deal with that when you're also working during the hours that they're open. But if you're working from home, it's no big deal. Nobody knows that you took an hour away from your home office to run that errand, and as long as you make it up at the end of the day so that you're still getting your work done, it doesn't really matter, either.
2. They are able to spend more time with their kids by being home when their kids get home from school, then doing the last couple of hours of their workday after the kids are in bed.
3. They don't have to waste an hour or two of their day every day driving to an office for no obvious benefit in terms of how much they get done versus doing the job from home. They also don't have to pay for fuel, wear and tear on their car, higher car insurance rates, etc.
4. Many have bought houses farther away from work, where they can afford much nicer housing per dollar spent. They don't really want to move back into the tiny, cramped 1200-square-foot apartments that they can afford in the city when they can live an hour away in 2600-square-foot standalone houses with yards for the same amount of money, and they also don't really want to deal with spending a couple of extra hours every day because of the longer commutes to the middle of nowhere.
5. Many find it easier to work from home, because there are fewer distractions. (Note that the reverse is also true; many people find it easier to work from the office, also because there are fewer distractions.)
6. Many find it less stressful to work from home, because they can kick back and watch TV while their builds finish or their tests run for fifteen or twenty minutes instead of sitting there pretending to be busy.
7. Many also find that not having to spend time driving leaves more time for exercise, which improves their health compared with working from an office.
8. Many also find that the extra hassle of never being able to find meeting rooms makes working with people in distant offices harder when actually in the office than when working from home.
9. Most find that having a couple of days in which working from home is expected causes their bosses and others to not schedule so many meetings on those days, which means they have actual focus time to work on projects instead of wasting time in meetings explaining why they're too busy with meetings to make progress on their projects.
Ultimately, it comes down to this: If there's a reason to be in the office, fine, but a company had better have actual metrics to prove that I'm somehow going to be more productive in the office despite half the people that I work with regularly being in other states. After all, the rather large number of obvious and substantive benefits to working from home at least part of the time collectively outweigh the obvious benefits of working from an office to such a large degree that you'd have to be borderline nuts to think that moving everyone into an office five days per week will do anything other than make people miserable and reduce performance across the board.
Of course, if the real reason is to make people hate their jobs enough to leave, then their policy will likely be a complete success.
2000s knowledge work vs 1800s factory work (Score:4, Insightful)
No, these items are a realization that 21st century knowledge work is different from 19th century factory work.
The entire 20th-century workday structure seemed to have been built around 1800s industrial-revolution factory jobs with some "work-life balance" features added in later: 8-hour workday, 5-day workweek, paid vacation days, etc. But that's not the only work model. Half of my grandparents were farmers. 3/4ths of my great-grandparents were farmers. They were home when their kids came home from school and had flexibility to do things during weekdays or take a break between tasks.
"Paying people for not working" is also a 19th century factory concept where work got done at a point-location in the factory. Or where most 19th/20th century knowledge work got done at a point location on site -- e.g., a drafting table or laboratory. Even RTO champions realize that much of the knowledge work gets done during the coffee breaks, or lunch, or in the parking lot. Or, even for in-office workers, thinking about work during the commute or at home.
Remote work creates real challenges, including development of junior employees and company culture. The 5-day workweek and 8-hour workday created challenges too. But creative solutions to those challenges are more likely to succeed than trying to drive workers back to a work model based on the pre-PC, pre-network mid 20th century office.
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Re:What is actually going on? (Score:4, Insightful)
Numbers 1, 2, and 6 sure sound like people want to be paid for not working.
No, Karen. Reread them.
1. Running an errand midday and making up the time at the end of the day. The same total time was put in. If this were at the office, then they would sneak out for the errand and get paid for running it.
2. Home when the kids get home, and make up for the interruption by working more in the evening. How is that wanting to be paid for not working?
6. Less stressful because there are downtimes during the normal workday (ex. waiting for a build to finish). Being better able to take advantage of those lulls does not steal anything from the company. In fact, they would have been streaming some youtube or something had they been in the office, which would be wasting company resources.
The welfare system is separate.
WTF is this bullshit? None of these people are collecting welfare. Oh, and WTF are you doing right now? Posting to slashdot while getting paid?
I don't see why companies should be paying people for not working.
... says the person posting to slashdot during business hours.
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The second those leases are up for renewal however, watch WFH becoming mandatory for large sections of their workforce as the management types collect a bonus for eliminating multiple large liabilities for the company. (Another round of stealth layoffs, and the non-renewal of said
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The real reason is that management doesn't want the multi-year tenant lease on their office buildings showing up on this quarter's budget reports as a loss due to not having enough butts in seats to justify having the buildings.
Unlikely. Having mandatory RTO three days per week versus five has no impact on that. You're still using the facility for the same number of employees, just for fewer days.
There is an optimal solution, but nobody is willing to do it. It involves giving each person a choice: either be in the office five days per week or choose two days to always be in the office and one day to be sometimes in the office, share a desk with someone else, and ensure that your deskmate is someone who chose the opposite days.
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Change is going on. It always is.
Some jobs require you to be on site it's unavoidable. Your choice.
Mine doesn't. And its a lot easier in peace and quiet to focus on it.
Working from home allows me to feel less like "working" at commuting and more like working at my job. I help keep the roads quieter, the earth cleaner and my well being well. I am more productive, less sick, I often start early or finish late, enjoying the work rather having to "work" at it. On my office days I am more pleased to see my c
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I work from home. For me there are multiple issues with going to the office every day.
- Risk of getting COVID. I have existing health issues, but even for very healthy people there is a chance of it causing debilitating and life-changing illness, i.e. Long COVID.
- Worse work/life balance.
- Lower pay, because commute time counts.
- Higher costs for commuting, food etc.
- Less productive due to distractions, open plan office etc.
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We all worked in the office before COVID
And? Did you ask people if this was the best feature of their work? Do they rank their job satisfaction by:
1. Sitting in an office.
2. Being stuck in traffic on a commute to work.
3. Being paid to do meaningful work.
I was in the office before as well. That doesn't mean I *liked* it.
work from home was only ever meant to be temporary
According to whom? My CEO used the phrase "the new normal" the way many other people have. We have changed our way of working fundamentally to accommodate this new normal and have not suffered in performance as a result. In fact w
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We all worked in the office before COVID
Speak for yourself. I've been working from home for most of the last 25 years. This whole thing isn't actually a new thing for tech, it's how those of us who worked on call got things done.
A RTO policy is good, as long as (Score:3)
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Productivity is the last concern. The goal is to have those 1-star extremely dissatisfied surveyed employees to quit. This way they fire them without explicitly firing them, thus avoiding to pay their severance packages.
Once they finish forcing people to "voluntarily" quit, they'll fire the old way the remaining quantity needed to reach the total workforce reduction quota they're aiming for. Then, and only then, they'll start focusing on productivity again.
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I mean the people who, according to the summary, said they're "very dissatisfied" with the return-to-office policy and who thus voted "1" in the grass-roots anonymous survey. They want enough people dissatisfied with the policy for enough of them them quit.
Sure, some, maybe many, of those dissatisfied who quite are also 5-star employees, but remember that executives serve only one customer, the shareholder, and provide only one service, increasing share prices this quarter. What the company does below that
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Yeah, I've seen how well those metrics work for measuring programmer and IT productivity.
Number of tickets completed? Make the tickets more granular.
Fewer bug reports? Combine multiple bugs into one bug ticket.
Fewer code review comments? Make sure your buddy reviews your PR and you review theirs.
More lines of code? Add plenty of white space and needless wrapping.
Metrics can be gamed by programmers or IT staff, and management can game them too. In much of tech, metrics mean nothing.
Call their bluff, let Amazon fire you (Score:3)
With enough people refusing to go to office while productively doing their job, Amazon will not dare actually firing them all.
The most stupid thing one can do in this situation is to quit. RTO is a quiet layoff, quitting is exactly what they wanted. One should respond by either ignoring it, or quid pro quo by quiet quitting and look for another job, or a combination of both.
RIF in disguise (Score:1)
All these companies who are cracking the reins on Return To Office are primarily interested in a Reduction In Force, but without having to deal with pesky labor law.
With how difficult it is to find the product you're looking for on Amazon, it should probably be equally difficult for them to find employees who aren't where they should be, too.
Re: RIF in disguise (Score:2)
Iâ(TM)m amazed there arenâ(TM)t class action suits for constructive dismissal since thatâ(TM)s what this is regardless of what they are doing.
Normally if you have to go further than where you work they have to pay you for travel time and miles. This should 100% be enforceable with RTO mandates as we all expected the home office workplace location.
This just adds hours of labor and expenses to workers who customarily did not have it for the past four years or more. It wasnâ(TM)t a brief 3-
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Re: RIF in disguise (Score:2)
If you change the place of work from say San Diego California to San Francisco, they would need to pay out unemployment insurance or pay for the commute.
Just because theyâ(TM)ve arbitrarily changed the location of work doesnâ(TM)t mean a worker must conform to their choice. They are on the hook for the difference. Iâ(TM)m not making this up or pulling it out of my ass. If my employer tells me to work 50 miles further from my home to a new office tomorrow they will pay me for the travel time p
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Not if the original place to work was always San Francisco, with a temporary arrangement of WFH.
If you worked in San Fran, went WFH, and moved to Arizona, well, your place of employment hasn't changed, and you certainly have the freedom to live as far away from that as you want, and the employer can still expect you to be at work on time in your office.
There's a reason you have to be really careful taking a WFH job; most employment contracts still have verbiage to the effect of 'at the discretion of the Emp
Disagree and commit (Score:2)
This management phrase just means "shut up and do what the boss says", right?
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In my experience, yes. I most ran into this with DEI and technical issues, but it affects everything.
Capitalists are dictators.
The full LP is actually... (Score:2)
Have backbone; disagree and commit.
I can't read the paywalled site but it sounds to me like they are at the first part of having a backbone to disagree. I am sure once that part is over, those who do not commit will 'leave'.
What? (Score:3)
Andy doesn't care, he's busy on his yacht this week and wants you to stop bothering him. Go back to the office and stop wasting your time being more productive at home. Your time doesn't matter, get with the program or find a new job.
I sincerely hope Andy chokes on his food, nobody will miss him.
Back to work! (Score:2)
For thee, but not for me (Score:3)
Mandates like this just show how clueless management can be.
I have always done a lot of work at home, and so have all of my colleagues. It works for us. Post-covid, our manager issued an RTO directive, which made zero sense, since home office wasn't just a Covid thing for us. We ignored him. He retired the next year, bye, don't let the door hit you on the way out.
He was replaced by the next clueless "leader". She rationalized away all the assigned desks (McKinsey "future of work" or somesuch idiocy), so now we have desk-sharing. Did she consult with anyone affected, to find out what we needed? We have various, genuine needs for in-office work, but she didn't ask - we just came in one day to find the office being turned into a factory-floor of identical, shared desks. Of course, her desk isn't get shared, I mean, she's more important than anyone else, right?
How to piss off your workforce in one easy lesson. Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, she is leaving next month for greener pastures.
I wonder what brilliant ideas the next glorious leader will have? Seriously, where do they find managers so out-of-touch with the people they manage?
Wait, aren't they a cloud/internet company? (Score:2)
So, for an Internet-based cloud company, are they admitting that they haven't really figured out how to work in the cloud?
Nothing screams toxic work environment... (Score:2)
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All jobs I had, I was required to show up... (Score:1)
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Data point (Score:2)
I got a ping from an Amazon recruiter and told them RTO was a deal breaker. They do very cool stuff, and I 5% miss the camaraderie of working in an office. That said, it's not worth hundreds of hours of commuting per year.
Complaining vs. willing to quit (Score:2)
This story about surveys and dissatisfaction reminds me about the news stories many years ago about how the majority of Silicon Valley residents were so unhappy that they were considering moving out of the area. Yet, the vast majority of those people ended up not moving.
There's a huge difference between being willing to anonymously voice dissatisfaction and being willing to quit.
What is needed is a positon of strength (Score:2)
A position of strength on the employees part is what's required to counter this policy.
1. Balls. There must be a group of employees who have the financial means to quit (as well as the psychological determination to quit) and get a job elsewhere.
2. Pike Square. This group must be able to communicate amongst themselves and form a united front against the policy.
Why it won't work:
1. People are conditioned to be wimps when under financial pressure. (I'm, not sure if this is something passed on when raised by p
Incoming threats (Score:2)
I wouldn't want to work on the corp security team at Amazon, every disgruntled worker has now been pushed a little closer to becoming an insider threat.