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.”
fortune.com
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"
You don't think all those come on lines make themselves up?
That shit takes work, worth more than his salary!
Particularly the cocaine one(s). Definitely (s)
Yes to the expensive lunch, but Secretary? Oh no, they don't go into the office. That's for you people.
"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."
"Disagree and commit" is a line that's used in Hardspace Shipbreaker by a terrible middle manager who's bullying his crew. It's so obviously framed in the game as just some bullshit to say shut up without using mean sounding words. I should have expected it came from the real world but it was so weird to see it crop up in a news article lol.
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.
Thing is, all else being equal, office-based work IS better (edit: in many cases). But all else is not even remotely equal. Office-based work has tremendous extra cost: rent, utilities, facilities, morale, commute time, mental exhaustion, inflexibility, environmental impact, and so on. Add it all up and while I don’t have the data to back it up, I’m pretty sure working from home is better.
Where's your data that, "all else being equal, office-based work IS better"? I mean, I don't have data that says otherwise, but I know the company I work for as well as higher-ups at other companies I've talked to noticed right out the gate that productivity went up when they went work from home. The same work needs to be done, and it gets done. If it doesn't, fire them. I have trouble seeing how the location the worker is in matters, all things being equal.
The company I am at experienced the same results - a surprising jump in productivity. But they are forcing us back to the office now. Odd, almost like productivity isn't a factor to them...
Fair enough. I should have qualified with “in many cases”. Design and creative work can be done in large part remotely, but benefit greatly from in-person collaboration and workshopping.
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.
They don't have leases. They own that real estate. So its value is a considerable line item in the company's value. If they get people in office, it's a boost to the company's value. The property is hit yet sunk in their eyes.
Yes, that's the sunk cost. It's fallacious to believe that: just because you've already paid for the real estate in an attempt to earn money in the long term, it's necessarily more profitable to see that plan to the end regardless of changes in circumstances. More often than not, it's better to just cut your losses.
I don't really understand what this means... We're talking about those people doing that same work, but from home. They're still doing the same amount (if not more due to higher efficiency) of work. Only now you don't need to pay the salaries of maintenance, janitorial staff, security, etc., which would be a savings and help recoup some of the losses.
Or, like I said, if they own the building, they could lease out part of it or all of it themselves while their employees do their work from home.
The people who claim "real estate value!" have just latched onto the simplest reason they can which aligns with their worldview.
The reasons I suspect companies are forcing return to office are more:
If getting people back into work makes your property more valuable that the productive losses, it's not a sunk cost. The leaders might be doing their math wrong, but they are not necessarily making a sunk cost fallacy here.
However, i do agree it's likely a choice driven by power and personalities, not money. I suspect a lot of talk about how remote workers can be abused and controlled has happened.
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.
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
Amazon is massive. Much of their overhead goes to workers, and if the workers were more efficient at home, the city would have to offer a ton of money to make up for the most productivity. So unless you have some convincing evidence otherwise, this is hard to believe.
"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.
You're contradicting the top level commenters point that they relentlessly pursue efficiency. Now it's that the pursue shareholder happiness. I wonder why you didn't correct them, but me.
It's almost like we're throwing explanations against the wall looking for something to stick.
But the simple counter is the simple explanation: we didn't know a pandemic was coming and couldn't foresee what no one was able to foresee: a rapid shift to WFH. We held the offices as we didn't know that WFH could be a long term solution. Now that we are pretty confident our workforce is more productive at home, we've decided to cut our office space losses.
No one would bat an eye at this.
"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’m about as pro wfh as it gets. It’s been one of the best life improvements I’ve had for me and I absolutely feel like it’s made me more productive for the people I work for.
That said, any statistic that begins with “workers say…” isn’t going to matter to the skeptics or c suite types. And a lot of those stats cited what workers say.
Fair point, to be quite honest it took me a while to even find those two sites. There may be better sources available but i also use duckduckgo for searching so ymmv.
But I absolutely agree with you. I do hybrid remote with my company and it not only saves me time but improves my quality of life significantly even only at 2 days a week.
And thats just what's normally available as i can request to work from home under special circumstances like when my cat was sick and i wanted to be around to make sure he was alright.
Work from home should be available to everyone it can possibly apply to like office work, programming, call center, etc in my opinion.
Won't really help. Most of them ignore reality and substitute their own.
Sure, but ratioing him with the actual data would be funny as hell.
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?
Care to share that data?
https://resources.owllabs.com/hubfs/SORW/SORW_2021/owl-labs_state-of-remote-work-2021_report-final.pdf?utm_campaign=State%20of%20Remote%20Work%202021&utm_medium=email&_hsmi=180908804&utm_content=180908804&utm_source=hs_automation
This is self reporting productivity, not actual productivity.
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.
Yep. My last job was a hybrid schedule and I was always far more productive at home than at the office. Because I was comfortable at home and had no distractions.
They give people adjustable chairs at work, so the concept that every worker isn't an identical and replaceable cog exists somewhere in their brains. Sadly it is behind the intense desire for money and will likely never be given the space to grow.
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.
Stop submitting old shit!
Submit new shit!
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then it’s a shit bot
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.
At some point the "prestige" of working for Amazon will become less attractive than having a life...
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
I don't have data for you eating lead chips either, but I'm sure it's better.
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?
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?
Trust me bro.
Literally everything he said rebuked that last sentence.
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.
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.
You've already moved the goalposts from:
To
The change in your language already admits one of my points landed, so thanks for the indirect admission.
That being said, I don't have the data to prove that when I walk down the sidewalk I'm not going to fall through the ground...although I have reason to believe that this won't happen. Does this make me a religious fundamentalist? Of course not. We don't need data for everything in order to come to reasonable conclusions based on past experience. Even if those conclusions are wrong and one day I do fall through the ground, that doesn't make me unreasonable or equivalent to a religious fanatic.
Sorry, but this is painfully naive. I absolutely agree that this is what is best for the worker, but it's not necessarily what's best for the business for a few reasons. One, mainly because of what the guy said in the article that there are many reasons why being in the office is better: collaboration being the big one. Additionally if workers always were making that decision based on how they work best then that would be one thing, but we know that is not how people work and they are going to be making decisions on what's best for them. I mean, just go and look at the over employed subreddits. It's filled with people figuring out ways to make it look like you're working without actually working.
I think flexibility is important, but my experience is that our team works better when people are in the office. Im sure WFH is better for a tiny subset of workers (from a productivity standpoint) but in all the places I've worked it seems almost like wilful ignorance to ignore the benefits of people working in the same space.
You left out the second part of my initial comment, not surprising since it expresses what I said in my expanded response. "...but just believe it anyways." and then you left out that same sentiment in my second response.
You didn't address my point about my comment being a structual critique probably because you were more concerned with comparing the differences in my wording vs extracting the meaning and arguments from those words.
Actually, there is data to support your trust in walking down the sidewalk safely. Sidewalks are built by crews of concrete workers, and that process at every level is overseen by trained individuals who conform to clear standards for concrete strength, safe construction practices, etc. So no, your act of walking on a sidewalk doesn't require blind faith.
Plus, it doesn't matter, you're trying to make a point about epistemic warrant and I'm trying to make a point about structual inequality in corporate America. Plus, even if you didn't have any good reasons to think sidewalks were safe to walk on, that's still not equivalent to my argument because in that example, you aren't trying to impose your personal view on others. Religious fundies are almost never content just believing their doctrine in a vaccum, they attempt to impose it onto other people who don't share their views.
Your whole last point misses what I said. I never claimed that WFH is universally better for employees, I said that it should be up to the employees and their teams to decide what works best for them. There are reasons other than general productivity why WFH is better for some workers, like the example I gave of folks who have extremely long commutes.
But because of the structural inequality within the corporate world, those considerations are thrown into the trash by executives that get to impose their will on those workers just because vibes. (I actually think in many cases it's far more nafarious than that, but I'm being charitable in my assumptions here.)
And finally, I never claimed there are no benefits to working in the office, I literally said that I was a person who enjoys a hybrid situation. I'm arguing for more workplace democracy, instead of an authoritarian environment where the high-ups get to impose their will on everybody else based on nothing more than their feelings.
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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I feel it in me booones! And my right tibia is always right.