Posted on 11/01/2024 11:40:36 AM PDT by absalom01
More than 500 employees from Amazon’s cloud-computing division have asked the company to reconsider its five-day in-office mandate set to take effect in January.
The new policy requires workers to be in the office five days a week, an increase from the current three-day-a-week mandate that has been in place since May 2023. Amazon workers protested the initial three-day-a-week mandate as well, but Amazon did not change course. About 15 months later, it increased the requirement for in-office work in an effort to return to pre-pandemic norms.
The employee letter is in response to comments from Garman at a recent AWS town hall meeting, where the new CEO told employees that if they did not want to comply with the five-day-a-week mandate, there are other companies around.
In an interview with The Seattle Times last week, Garman doubled down on those comments, confirming that he supports the new policy and believes employees work better when they are in the office together.
“It’s OK that’s not how everyone thinks that’s how they want to work,” Garman told The Times. “You can choose to go work for another company … Employees get to make the call.
(Excerpt) Read more at seattletimes.com ...
I know someone who fled Seattle and moved totally out of state for another job because he lived in the city and had to commute by bus to avoid high parking fees.
The problem with the city buses—homeless people doing their business on the bus.
He just had enough—and bailed.
Once folks have had a taste of working at home they may commute for a while but they will have those resumes out there—and the good ones will get snatched away.
It will be a slow bleed for Amazon.
By the time they figure out what happened it will be too late.
I would just cut compensation for remote working employees, say 20% less, or come into the office and keep the same pay scale.
Fire them all.....................
That would probably be close to their productivity decline from working at home.
Remote can work for some people, and some companies, but it’s got plenty of challenges. Not the least of which being the cultural and legal structures that come along with “W2” employment.
One system that seems to work well is those workers and businesses who approach the problem from a more entrepreneurial perspective. Remote work can be just fine if it’s understood more as an independent contract, the terms of which can be negotiated by both parties and renewed, or not, by either party at the end of the term of the agreement. But that has problems of its own, not the least of which being the massive friction created by managing a bunch of 1099 contracts, and the efforts in many blue states to effectively ban a lot of the simplest 1099 agreements (eg California AB5 testing).
It’ll be interesting to see how this shakes out in Amazon’s case, for sure.
Some how these people think a job is a right.
Or, the Amazon employees could stop voting Democrat and see the city go back to what they moved there for.
And a few million eager, brilliant folks will be there to take their place.
I work from home but have to go in a few days now and soon 3 days.
Actually being wide awake when working is something I forgot :)
And I enjoy getting out 3 days a week.
A compromise would be nice on amazon’s part...3 days in...2 days home
Every business from different—but if a business was able to function reasonably well with work-at-home employees they are taking major risks by trying to force them into the office.
This is not the old days where company loyalty to employees generated employee loyalty to companies.
The odds of working more than (say) ten years or more for a tech company has got to be less than 50%—due to choices by either party.
If you can do all your work from home you are easy to replace and aren’t worth much.
I needed a laboratory and had to do hands on work as an engineer.
I could at times work from home, but most of the time I had the be physically on site for example on top of a 14,000 volcano.
I have no pity for work at home people making $100,000 a year just typing
When Elon started stepping away from the democrat plantation, negative newspaper stories became common.
Now that Bezos has stepped on the Washington Post’s fat egos, negative stories about Amazon will become more common.
That’s how democrat’s roll... they’re thin skinned thugs.
I’m very much in the libertarian camp on this — if someone has marketable skills and is able to negotiate a remote work situation, good for them.
In my experience it doesn’t work for most people, and personally, I hated it when my company tried it early on during the Chinese corona virus madness.
What I’ve seen is that the people most vocal in demanding it were by far the least valuable, and when we went back to 100% in-person work those that left in a huff were the folks with productivity issues in the first place.
I suspect that Amazon will find the same thing. There may be a handful of highly productive, and highly specialized people who can be accommodated with some sort of 1099 arrangement, but for the most part those who leave won’t be the top performers.
Well Elon was an early adopter of the “get back to work” movement. IIRC, his comment was “they should pretend to work somewhere else”. Which was kinda hilarious, I have to admit.
Amazon should institute a "pay at risk" or performance-based incentive/bonus system that sets annual performance goals for the enterprise (e.g., share price, ROCE, etc.), for each major department (e.g., budget, profit/cost center goals, etc.), and for each division/team (e.g., projects delivered on-time/on budget, budget/cost metrics, etc.), with bonus percents of salary attached to each level.
At the end of the year, each employee receives the percent of salary for each level of metric that has been achieved. If teams miss their goals and do not receive their associated incentive pay, then they have only themselves to look for reasons why. If teams that work 5 days in the office are meeting their performance goals while teams that work-from-home do not, then team peer pressure will drive performance norms for the following year.
-PJ
Seems to me more and more US workers are acting like spoiled children about working from home. Maybe what those CEOs should do is say “The salary you’re paid will be whatever portion the number of work days you are here divided by five days time the salary you were hired in at”.
The remedy is that they receive salary for the amount of work processed and not for hours worked.
AWS doesn't give a damn about "productivity" or "company culture." If they did, they never would have sent these people to work from home in the first place back in 2020.
AWS is downsizing ... and this is an effective way to do it without paying severance or running up unemployment insurance claims.
Two of the most principled people I know from those days include the following:
1. One guy in senior management was fired from his job in 2020 because he refused to follow the company's lockdown orders and work from home. He got the last laugh when he got a comparable position working for his former company's biggest client -- which probably means the former employer lost that client. LOL.
2. Another guy is working for a company that has a full-time RTO policy in place since last year, but he has ignored it and can get away with it because he works in a highly specialized job and can't be replaced easily. It's become a major embarrassment to his boss. Last year the boss practically begged him to come back to the office, and when the boss asked him what it would take to get him back, he mentioned the 2020 fiasco I cited above and said: "I'll come back when the CEO resigns in disgrace -- or kills himself."
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