Amazon exec says it’s time for workers to ‘disagree and commit’ to office return — “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”::“We’re here, we’re back. It’s working,” an Amazon Studios head said in a meeting, before acknowledging a lack of evidence.
Amazon monitors and logs and analyzes everything. As a company they are all about data. If they find something that will get the package out the door one half second faster, they’ll spend millions rolling it out everywhere.
If he doesn’t have the data, there is zero chance that means the data doesn’t exist. That means the data paints a very different picture and he has chosen to ignore it.
I would put money on this.
Business owners and business leaders are all about efficiency, unless it inhibits their ability to keep you under their boot.
You realize this is a self defeating point, right? If they knew the workers were more efficient at home they would commit to total WFH.
The logical conclusion from your claims is not that the data contradicts what he wants to be true, but that the data confirms that return to office is better, but for some reason he can’t share that information.
No, it does not. It means that they think it’s more profitable for shareholders.
So the logical conclusion is that it’s better for the share holders for the employees to be less productive?
It’s not that simple. There’s also the issue of paying rent for offices which also feeds into shareholder (although possibly different shareholders) profits, etc. I’m no expert, but I have a feeling this is all very complicated.
I can’t come up with a care where making their employees less productivity is better for the shareholders simply because they are paying for space somewhere. you’ll have to explain this.
Okay I can do that.
Pre-pandemic- Amazon says offices are important. Signs 25 year leases for lots of office space.
Pandemic hits. Everyone goes WFH. Data shows people work just as well from home. Company publicly announces that they are running at full productivity. Shareholders love it.
Now we’re here. Employees are WFH and loving it. Middle management is chafing because they like being able to manage their employees by walking to desks. Upper management is unhappy because they like having a big corner office at the top of the building humming with workers. Workers are happier than ever.
Upper management says ‘if we embrace WFH, we’ll have way too much office space and leases that will cost a fortune to break. If we do that and take the hit, the shareholders will ask why we didn’t have the vision to do that in the first place, before we signed for this expensive office. The managers we listen to all hate WFH too. So we’ll push RTO.’ And in the grand scheme of things, a few % employee productivity doesn’t mean that much…
Thats plausible, but pretty complicated. I would absolutely invoke Occam’s razor here tho
Okay then even simpler, management likes having workers they can physically see and thinks it makes them more productive. Amazon may relentlessly pursue efficiency, but they also make choices in how they do that based on their own culture. For example, if they paid their employees more but weeded out all but the best employees, which is the strategy Netflix uses, that might also increase efficiency more than just cycling through employees like disposable robots. But they don’t do that (or even try it) because that isn’t their culture.
Pretty sure Amazon gets kickbacks from the city of Seattle to keep the offices filled with ppl