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.”
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.”
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.
You should also pay everyone 2 million dollars a year. The company will do great and your employees will be happy. I don't have the data to back it up, but I know it's better!
You know for a fact that motherfucker thinks eating lunch at a Michelin rated restaurant and headed back to the office to pressure his secretary to fuck him is "work"
"I don't have data to back it up, but I know it's better."
This is every boss in every company throughout time lol
How do statements like that not spook investors? You're telling me that leadership in the world's largest internet hosting service are making decisions without collecting relevant data first, or worse, wilfully ignoring the data available that doesn't support their preference? That is not a good sign for the future growth of AWS.
One of Amazon's core values is being data driven. If you want to change something, you colllect data about it first. It was one of employees large counterpoints to RTO at the org, the lack of data provided about its value.
This is the exec admitting they aren't following the Amazon process, but are making people do it anyway.
"Disagree and commit" is another one of their principles, i.e "we acknowledge that you disagree, but you need to commit anyway now that we made the decision." Better known as "Im the boss, so shut up."
This guy is just a bald face saying "we dont have the data to back this up so we shouldn't do it, but i said do it, so do it."
The investors are also invested in commercial real estate, so it's a win/win .
Because executives and investors are often cut from the same cloth, flaws and all. Plenty of them will have the same baseless belief that office-based work is “just better”.
Plenty of the are also investors in commercial real estate as well as tech companies, and property bubbles need regular reinflation.
I think this stuff entices investors more than anything
The business bro in a nutshell.
Its ironic too cuz Amazon analytics and measures everything. If they don't have it, it don't exist
My previous company’s head blamed poor FDA results on WFH and then mandated everyone to be in the office 4 times a week. People who work from home don’t even work on that stuff, it was just an excuse to justify buying yet another building.
I wish these assholes would just come out and tell the truth: they need you in the office to justify their multi-decade office leases that they can't get out of.
Ding ding ding!
That's still sunk cost fallacy. If they've already paid, it doesn't matter. In fact, they'd probably save money on maintenance and overhead by keeping the office empty (or even subletting it or something).
But that would require them to admit they were wrong and not prescient.
Corporations base so many decisions on sunk cost.
At least then we'd know it was a rational decision.
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.
The data does exist and shows one thing: the death of commercial property and long term leases accruing cost without creating value.
This is incompatible with capitalism and so it's working hard to eliminate the incongruence.
The funny thing is, it's compatible with capitalism, just people are either afraid of change or invested in the old ways.
Amazon would love a 1% increase in employee productivity, unless it means $500MM worth of lease breaking fees and shareholders grilling them for why they signed those leases in the first place. Or worse they bought the building, and now have to sell it at a big discount.
Everyone's invested in commercial real estate because it was a cash cow. Now the party's over, and rather than acknowledge that lots of people (and cities) have a financial incentive to try and keep the party going.
Of course the shitty thing is the big losers in all this are the individual people. The workers in a city lose when property values (and cost of living as a result) are so high they can't afford rent. The workers in a company lose when they have to waste time and money commuting. But nobody seems to give a shit about the little guy...
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.
"We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." --Anais Nin
A manager who thinks physical access to employees makes him an effective manager is going to push for that, even if the data says otherwise. We see this in every industry. During pandemic the headline was 'productivity is flat or increasing with WFH', now it's 'time for RTO'.
It's also not just about management, it's about real estate. Companies including Amazon have paid billions for office space, including long term leases that will be very costly to break. So if they say WFH is the future, they'll have to explain to their shareholders why they signed for (apparently unnecessary) office space that's hurting the bottom line.
"I don't know how to micro-manage people unless I can see them sitting in an open floorplan."
AKA, he is so out of the loop he has no idea what his subordinates actually do, so he has no way of assessing their productivity. Thus his only recourse is to fall back on his gut feelings on whether people "look busy" and other nebulous bullshit .
Oh, that's interesting, because lots of people have the data. It says the exact opposite of that, though.
Do you have a link to that because it would be useful to pull up whenever some sycophant tries to defend forcing people back into the office
https://toggl.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
https://www.strongdm.com/blog/remote-work-statistics
Couple links i found with sources for the statistics. Owllabs is a common source between tem but i tried to find at least 2 sites with different sources.
I don't have data to back it up but I know it's better
I do have data to back it up, and I know it's not.
I have the data just from car usage alone. It is braindead easy to produce a detailed ROI document proving how much money both the employer and employees are saving from remote work. It's a lot from both sides, and that's not including all of the less tangible benefits, like morale, team building, more focused work with less distractions, etc.
If you dig into the links in the article, there is one study finding data entry workers in India worked only 87% as hard as their in office counterparts, however, the studies authors are quick to point out living conditions and management styles are significantly different there than in the US. There is also a study in the US which found that approximately 40% of time saved by not commuting went to additional work. Guess which study is brought up in more articles by FORTUNE?
Once again, someone in authority misuses their power by dictating what they want reality to be as truth, rather than finding impartial data and serving stakeholders, they ignore their duty and serve their own ego.
Evidence that top-down capitalism sucks ass even at what it is allegedly supposed to do. It's autocratic feudalism with extra steps, and should be confronted accordingly.
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!”
It really sounds like he thinks workers are refusing to return to work purely out of a sincere belief that wfh is better for the company and not “go fuck yourselves this is really nice and I’m able to do my job just as well from my home”
I'm able to do my job (and life) better with work from home.
I don't crave the social interaction as much as others. Social situations wear me out, and the ability to schedule my work fairly freely means that I can work around my debilitating neurological condition. Work from home has given me the opportunity to function mostly like a normal member of society, and I really value that.
Honestly don't think I'd last long if a return to office was made mandatory. If I don't burn out I'll jump off a bridge or something.
I love socially interacting with my co-workers. I can just as easily do that over teams. Better honestly, as if I'm focused heavily on a task, I can take a moment to stop at a convenient spot before checking my messages. As opposed to having people literally walk up to me or just start talking to me while I'm busy doing something. The face to face conversation was nice, but the pros far outweigh the cons in my opinion.
I personally will never go back. I have adhd and being able to stay home and thusly have 0 commute time has been an absolute wonder for my well-being.
When wfh was implemented company wide at the start of Corona communication actually got better because now everyone was forced to use a chat app with video calling. That way every colleague was just one click away. The shyer ones typed out their quick requests and those who needed to see a face called with the webcam enabled. Before that it was just too much hassle for some people to write an email, use the telephone or walk through the large building to the colleague. Even quick meetings with people from four different departments were now much easier and quicker to organise.
How about... No?
I'm one of the folks who actually likes to go in to the office every once in a while, but I'm never making it a daily commute. Never again.
Hell, I'm on an international team now. Over the course of the pandemic, we built ourselves up with folks from multiple states and multiple countries. There is exactly one person on my team I could see regularly if we went back to the office. Literally everyone else is hundreds of miles away at a minimum. Many would need passports.
And that one person? He's got an immune-compromised family member, so he's never going back to the office and risking his loved one's life.
Fortunately, my employer knows it would make zero sense to require all of us to go back to the office. My boss doesn't even live in the same state as me.
Yeah, I'm never commuting again, either.
For companies, your laziest employees are the ones who want to be in the office, because they know that's the only metric the company is measuring, so they go in and fuck around doing nothing all day.
Companies who don't get with the remote work program are dinosaurs and will die off over time.
Same, winter is coming, with snow a commute could be 2h forth and 2h back, to do ~20 miles ; never again.
Same. All the meetings I attend comprise of people from different parts of the world. If I go in to the office, all my meetings will be on zoom anyway, so what's the point of being physically present? I only come in from time to time as well and the primary purpose is socialization, where the only other person on my team in the same location as me plan to meet up in the office, which is once every few weeks.
There was not a single thing at my last job that I needed to do in the office that I couldn't accomplish at home. Not one. I know, because it was a hybrid schedule and I did the exact same thing both places. They didn't even need to get me equipment to do my work at home. I just did it on my computer I already had. Everything was either done directly on the company's website or was Google cloud-based and all of our meetings were via Zoom.
And yet, I had to come in half the week. It wasn't even a saving money on real estate thing because it was an office that was part of a big warehouse/factory, so they would not only need the space regardless, they could actually put more production lines in if they could take out the office space.
It made absolutely no sense.
August 3, 2023
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I guarantee they haven't changed their minds on this. Maybe we should keep talking about it.
They have the data. It's Amazon. The data just doesn't say what they want it to say.
Say you're a control freak without saying you're a control freak 🤣
The speaker owns a company.
IMO, that's easily one of the best ways to determine if someone is controlling.
Return to the office “My source is that I made it the fuck up” edition.
Fuck this piece of shit,
Since March 2020 I work from home. 2 years for a company ~20 miles from me, I went there 1 time to take a PC and 1 time to bring the PC back at the end of my contract. Then a year in a company ~100 miles from me (did 4 trips to bring HW), and for next year I should have a 2+ years contract for a company ~375 miles away.
Never ever I will RTO commuting useless hours. If the job is 5 minutes from me I may, but else, never.
Better be 5 minutes walking
Nope. My last job was a 10-minute commute. Still not going back to an office. Nothing in my skillset requires me working in an office.
Amazon exec is about to lose good employees to other places that pay better and have better benefits (like work from home days).
Amazon, the store, is already in a downward spiral of quality. Other stores like Shein, Ali Baba, Wish, etc. are slowly gaining market worldwide. Plenty of people are preferring quality brick and mortar stores than online shopping more and more. It's small but it is a trend.
True.
And not only for the quality. In the last weeks I noted that, aside being basically impossible to look for a product even querying with the full brand and product name/code, that buying the same item from the brand own on-line store is ofter less expensive than buying it from Amazon (even with Prime) also accounting for the shipping costs.The more I hear about how crappy Amazon are treating their employees the less I want to buy from Amazon again.
I'm not so sure. Black Friday shopping barely kept up with inflation this year, but cyber Monday shopping was up over 12%, so while I'm with you in the minority that prefer a real quality store, it seems most folks don't.
Amazon exec doesn't give a shit. Their whole model with tech workers is to recruit them based on the "prestige" of working for Amazon, dunno increasingly more talking on them, burn them out before they start asking for real raises, rinse and repeat.
Their whole model with tech workers is to recruit them based on the “prestige” of working for Amazon,
At some point the "prestige" of working for Amazon will become less attractive than having a life...
My company subleased 3 out of 4 stories of the office building when they realised most people could happily and effectively work from home. Crazy eh?
Ah, there it is
I wish you could do word substitution in real life like you can with text substitution. If so, every time I heard "I don't have the data to back it up," it would become "I'm an idiot who doesn't know what I'm talking about but-"
But wouldn’t that be too long? At that point, you’d either have to speed it up or you’d have to push back everything else they were saying, causing you to be delayed.
I’d shorten it to “I’m making this the fuck up”.
Seems to work fine in Star Trek
Literally everything he said rebuked that last sentence.
I don't have data for you eating lead chips either, but I'm sure it's better.
Trust me bro.
People don't want to because WFH is much better for employees. Why waste time on commute, gas, and get out from the comfort of your home?
RTO is only "better" for the owning class.
RTO makes it harder to micromanage > employees realise they can self-organise > employees form unions and demand "better" employment contracts
Also the money saved by not commuting has allowed (some) office workers to save up for emergency funds, which comes in handy when it is time for a strike.
RTO = preventative union busting
every time my boss threatened RTO I got a new job with a raise. My current company pays me twice what I was making the first time someone tried to force me back into the office, and they don't have an office. They have a PO box for what little physical mail they get, and that's it.
Shut the fuck up, these people need to hear that when this comes out of their mouths. Shut the fuck up, we are struggling and you are not.
It is surprising that they just came out and admitted there is no evidence to back up what they are doing.
Bosses need to fuck right off with their war against remote work.
Amazon doesn't have data? I say bullshit!
Straight up fundamentalist religious thinking right there.
"There isn't any reason for you to believe what I'm saying, but just believe it anyways."
This is not at all what he said. I understand that the facts are unimportant in the face of the narrative, but he just said he doesn't have the facts to back up what he believes is true. There are lots of reasons to believe it is true, and he gave a bunch. Whether or not it is true is hard to tell without the data, but claiming he's saying nothing more than "just because" is ignoring the facts in favor of what you want to be true.
I mean, unless you have the facts to back up your (I assume) claim that WFH is better, then you are no different than he is on this, and you are effectively calling yourself a "fundamentalist religious" thinker.
Nice try, but maybe practice in the garage next time before stepping up for a debate.
- What do you call somebody who admits they have no data or evidence to back up what they believe but still insists that they are right and you have to agree with them? Yeah, a religious fundamentalist is a good example. His claim was all anecdotal, he just "feels" like people work better in person based on his own subjective experience.
Now that might be fine when it comes to some things, live and let live, etc. The difference here is that he and other upper management get to just force the rest of the workers to conform to their viewpoint without any evidence. It's a structural problem.
-
I never claimed that WFH is universally better than in-office work, so strike two on that one. I'm merely critiquing his approach of forcing workers to conform to a policy that he believes in, based on no supporting evidence, just vibes. I was making a structural critique.
-
If you want my actual viewpoint, I think that WFH should be up to the employee. Some people work better in person, some people work better from home, and some (like me) enjoy hybrid because of the flexibility it offers. Also, some people are brutally punished by mandated in-office work. A person who has a 90 minute commute both ways (who typically isn't compensated for commute time,) is a perfect candidate for WFH. But because this guy "feels like" WFH is bad, he gets to just dictate that from on high instead of workers being able to figure out what works best for them and their teams.
In other words, nuance is important, unless you are a fundie who builds their beliefs off vibes and anecdotes and then imposes them on other people regardless of their views, desires, situations, or objective data.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly told members in an internal meeting that when it comes to returning to the office, “it’s time to disagree and commit.
Nonetheless, Hopkins added, a return to the office is important because it’s the personal belief of CEO Andy Jassy and other top brass that “we just do our best work when we’re together.”
This time last year, Jassy said Amazon had no plans for a compulsory office return and instead intended to “proceed adaptively.” That sentiment didn’t last, and Jassy soon joined peers Elon Musk and Sundar Pichai in their pro-office enthusiasm, mandating an office return earlier this year (the company does have an exception request process that’s considered on a case-by-case basis).
But Annie Dean, VP of Team Anywhere at Atlassian and Meta’s former director of remote work, told Fortune the whole idea is a misnomer.
Any bosses expecting office presence by itself (rather than a full cultural overhaul) to solve existing problems of productivity, innovation, or creativity will be sorely disappointed.
Opportunities for mentorship, communication, and learning by osmosis are difficult to replicate over Zoom, particularly for early-career workers or recent hires, a wide swath of research has found.
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