Amazon CEO Andy Jassy recently told employees that those who do not want to return to the office at least three days a week should consider finding employment elsewhere. According to a recording obtained by Insider, Jassy stated “It’s past the time to disagree and commit,” adding that if employees cannot commit to the new hybrid work model, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.” He characterized the decision to have employees return to the office part-time as a “judgment call.” Notably, Jassy said employees are free to leave if they do not want to comply with the hybrid work requirement. This makes clear that Amazon has not changed its stance on returning to office work despite some employees preferring full remote arrangements.
When COVID hit and the company I was with at the time went 100% remote, upper management discovered our productivity went up. That same company started forcing people back into the office as soon as they could. Watching a team of executives intentionally harm their company and try to justify it was wild. It wasn’t about being profitable, it was about control for controls sake.
And real estate. Don’t forget real estate.
To be honest, it is also a bit about productivity. Doing full remote will in time become less efficient, at least I notice an uptick in how smooth interactions go after we have been physically together a bit more. There is no reason why it has to happen all the time, though.
But the task for management should really be to make people want to come to the office. I.e. make it a better place to be than at home, and ensure commutes are short and flexible. In my team, the typical commute is about 10 minutes, and most of us will go to the office to meet, have lunch, and get a break from home. We are social creatures, and meeting people is good for us.
During an interview, a high-tech company insisted on being at the office 4 days/week, said no-thanks to my application when I asked to come on average 2 days/week in the office due to the commute.
I understand the need to have regular in-person meetings, but insisting on coming 3-4 days/week in the office when then work can be done remotely seems more about control than productivity. It’s also extra unpaid hours spent commuting.
I tell you one way they could do that - offer extra money to people for every day they’re in the office, to offset the expenditures on gas, maintenance, and incidentals, as well as the opportunity cost of time lost on commute and preparing meals. I did the math, with the thirty minute commute one way, I save about $2.5K a year on gas alone.
As someone who has the option to go full remote but does not do well with it, I’d be happy to at least get extra stuff covered. My public transportation is not cheap, and the food situation is a mess.
It probably wouldn’t work, but I’ve been wondering whether it would be possible to use the shareholders of publicly traded companies against them in these situations.
I’ve seen people mention that companies are obligated to maximize profits for their shareholders (might not be true everywhere, and my knowledge on the subject is extremely limited).
If there was data available for a given company that showed that profits were increased during a period where a substantial part (or all) of the employees worked from home, and then the company starts forcing the employees back to the office, could the board not be called upon to force the company to keep people in work-from-home-mode? Would the company not be obliged to do that, to maximize the profits? It seems to me that this would be in the best interest of the shareholders.
Nope, because the biggest shareholders in the vast majority of companies are financial institutions like Blackrock, that coincidentally have large commercial real estate portfolios as well.
Individual shareholders are a drop in the ocean next to that immense amount of centralized wealth. When you think of shareholders, it’s not even the 1%, it’s a couple hundred people who own everything.
Thanks, that makes perfect sense, and gels perfectly with my knowledge on the subject being ridiculously limited 😅
Are there any really big companies that don’t have shareholders? Just curious if it’s even possible to get really big without selling stock. Guess it’s probably a thing that even if there are any that don’t, they probably still have investors. Would be fun to know if there are companies out there that managed everything just on their product, growing organically I guess.
edit: to partially answer my own question, here is Wikipedia’s list of the largest private non-governmental companies by revenue.
You can get reasonably big, but in most Western markets public companies who are owned by the same few institutions have a controlling anticompetitive share.
A company I worked for went full on into a corporate workspace refresh to open concept during COVID. Writing was on the wall and they tried to recall people 3 months into COVID-which failed spectacularly. I found a remote job shortly after and while I do go in from time to time on my own account, I don’t really miss traffic or open office plans.
I suspect this is partially a result of change, not that work from home was implemented. Shaking up a work environment (for something more desirable to the employee) is always a morale and productivity boost. Move everyone from a bull pen to offices, or move to a new facility where there are fewer distractions and new equipment, or simply change the work schedule to a 9x9 or 4x10 and you’ll see short term gains. .
Regardless of the cause of the productivity boost, full time WFH will come at the expense of training young (or new to the field) employees. Ironically, part of the cost of training new employees comes out of the billable hours of the experienced ones. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a 20%-25% reduction in output of an employee who is given an intern or new hire to mentor. That won’t happen when you’re remote because the new hire can’t constantly bug you for simple requests, ask for more work, or require active review and monitoring of their work process. But in a couple of years, you’ll have two people at 100% (nominal) output in return for the loss in productivity of the mentor.
It’s said that it takes 150% of the annual salary in costs to a company to replace someone. Having mentored young engineers, most cost me far more in the first year than I billed, and it took close to 3 years to break even - and that’s at a relatively low salary. To have mentored someone remotely for the first year would have likely taken even longer to get them up to speed and profitable. In the short term, moving your office of independently competent individuals remote should absolutely produce a boost in productivity.
Anyway, it’s this long view that is the actual, actionably logic behind the return to the office. That isn’t to excuse the micromanagers who’s only job was to walk around and remind people to put covers on their TPS reports - they are no more than overpaid hall monitors and a relic that should die. It also doesn’t excuse the upper managers who never understood the concept of sunk cost in college and feel that they need to fill the seats in the building where they have another 8 years on their lease.
Employers these days don’t bother with that any more, so that doesn’t explain it.
Google just told me that three million people graduate from college each year full of technical knowledge but with effectively zero workplace skills and more than 5 out of 6 get jobs. All those people pretty much need to be trained from scratch. Does it affect every workplace? No. But for the vast majority of large companies there is a constant flow of fresh blood they need to beat into the corporate mold.
1 out of every 6 college graduates not getting a job is a full-blown jobs crisis.
“In the first six months post graduation”, is the qualifier to that stat, I believe
When I was a kid, a college degree was a job ticket, so that’s still seriously alarming.