?? What does Amazon know that others don’t?
This is an excerpt from the latest Sunday edition of Exponential View.
The company’s diktat that all employees must work from the office five days a week puzzles me. While employees appreciate remote work’s flexibility and studies show it doesn’t reduce productivity, Amazon—known for meticulously measuring everything—has opted to end the WFH era. The question remains as to why I can think of a number of reasons…
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Yet the policy may lead to top employees leaving. Stanford economics professor Nick Bloom predicts that turnover rates could rise by 30%, so Amazon must believe that the benefits outweigh the loss of talent. And it's likely relying on internal data that others don't have. If it succeeds (and most RTOs don’t)* it could set the tone for the future of remote working—but if it fails, it could be the slayed giant that shuts people up about RTOs for good.
What do you think?
*Almost 40% of US employees have had two or more return-to-office plans.
You make a really interesting point about overall *team* metrics possibly leading in this decision. The interesting question for me is whether large-scale organisations are genuinely able to measure the knock-on, “radiating” impact of those individuals for whom the mix of wfh/office enables them to contribute to teams who’d otherwise not get any benefit from them at all… I’d argue that there are some people whose impact is off the scale (and at a variety of levels). Are they always going to be people who can commit to office hours & location? I’d love to see if anyone had any research on this!
AI and contemporary artist | Partner - The Factory, artist owned nomadic gallery | Activist
3 周I am very unsure about whether face-to-face encourages better innovation. I have spent plenty of time inside corporates and even more walking the streets, visiting coworking and cooking up ideas by getting out and about. Internal innovation is almost always dysfunctional and in need of a large dose of external input. That is less likely with people stuff in their own silos!!
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3 周What they know is - till digital food can't be eaten, digital clothes can't protect, and digital homes won't be liveable - WFH is only a fictional concept that doesn't apply to the real world ;-)
Fractional CTO
3 周Come on, let's keep it real. It's 99% about reducing headcount without layoffs.
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3 周Even with "genuine" WFH cases - such such a single mother with a child - one could question overall productivity. Not on the individual level, but on a team level. I guess Amazon wants to address that, amongst other things... Also, we do expect shops, restaurants, factories, warehouses etc to fully staffed every day. Why would office workers be treated differently?.. Having said that, WFH is a good option to keep in the mix... But then, like you said, Amazon could know something we don't.