Amazon Employees Plead For Reversal of 5-Day RTO Mandate in Anonymous Survey (fortune.com)
- Reference: 0175132475
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/24/09/25/1941205/amazon-employees-plead-for-reversal-of-5-day-rto-mandate-in-anonymous-survey
- Source link: https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/amazon-employee-survey-rto-5-day-mandate-andy-jassy/
> Some Amazon workers are [1]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 [2]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.
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> 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.
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> 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."
[1] https://fortune.com/2024/09/24/amazon-employee-survey-rto-5-day-mandate-andy-jassy/
[2] https://slashdot.org/story/24/09/16/1845223/amazon-ceo-tells-employees-to-return-to-office-five-days-a-week
Re: Who is in charge over there??? (Score:1)
The term youâ(TM)re looking for is indentured servitude
Re: Who is in charge over there??? (Score:2)
They're trying to force them to quit.
Form A Union (Score:1)
If you want it bad enough and want to bring Mgmt. to the table, form a union.
This. (Score:3)
RTO is just stealth layoffs. We already have leaked comms from Amazon employees saying as much, with several people saying "I'm still working from home because they're not trying to fire me".
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)
If you live nearby I suppose going to the office would be ok. I was in Seattle this weekend and the Amazon headquarter is really nice.
Re: (Score:2)
How do you figure? Weren't most of them hired to work on-premises in the first place? We don't know how many prefer it. Obviously they aren't the ones signing a petition against it (in the guise of a 'poll')
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder how that will work since presumably the in-office expectations for managers would be higher than technical workers.
Perhaps companies founded since Covid will be more friendly to remote work.
Re: (Score:2)
> 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
What is actually going on? (Score:3)
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 being around people.
We all worked in the office before COVID, and work from home was only ever meant to be temporary to slow the spread of the virus before we had vaccines. I've got... I dunno... half a dozen shots now? Plus tested positive for COVID twice with the sniffles after being vaccinated a couple times, and the symptoms were always gone within the 5 days. Most people seem to just wear a mask when they're sick and/or self-isolate now.
So what's the real reason people are refusing to return to the office? You can go and find jobs that are 50% remote and 100% remote on job sites, if that's what you want. But if you started an on-premises job, why do people think they can refuse to come to work? Is it fear of being around human beings? Is it childishness? Are they secretly working a second job? What's actually going on?
Re:What is actually going on? (Score:4, 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.
Re: (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:2)
> But if you started an on-premises job, why do people think they can refuse to come to work?
But if you started as an intern, why do people think they can become executives?
Re: (Score:2)
If you have an interrupt driven job like being a manager they you more than likely want to work at the office. Then people can come to you in person and you are interrupted all day with important decisions and situations. If you have a technical job that is not interrupt driven like being a Software Engineer you need long periods of not being interrupted. I write software and by far I am much more productive at home. I just don't care what you did this weekend or if I heard about some rumor I don't care
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.
A RTO policy is good, as long as (Score:2)
Some metric is established to scientifically measure the policy's effectiveness on productivity. Otherwise it's just mandating for the sake of mandating. It should not be the goal of a for-profit company.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
and what they are getting instead is all the 1-star employees don't quit, because they can't get another job. So guess who is quitting? Yea, the people you don't want to quit.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Disagree and commit (Score:2)
This management phrase just means "shut up and do what the boss says", right?
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'.
Re: (Score:2)
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)
I feel this is an overt way for them to cut their workforce. The only issue is that some of the high performers will get caught in the crosshairs and this will damage amazon's corporate culture imo. I agree that it's smarter to just wait to be fired or laid off and then hire a lawyer.
Re: Quit (Score:2)
"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.