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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowAmazon corporate employees have been pushing back against the company’s return-to-office policy for months—and it seems CEO Andy Jassy has had enough.
During a pre-recorded internal Q&A session earlier this month, Jassy told employees it was “past the time to disagree and commit” with the policy, which requires corporate employees to be in the office three days a week.
The phrase “disagree and commit” is one of Amazon’s leadership principles, and was used often by the company’s founder and current executive chairman, Jeff Bezos.
“If you can’t disagree and commit, it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon,” Jassy said, adding it wasn’t right for some employees to be in the office three days a week while others refuse to do so.
His comments were first reported by Business Insider, and later shared by Amazon.
The current office attendance mandate, which was announced in February and went into effect in May, is a shift from Amazon’s previous policy that allowed leaders to determine how their teams worked. But the company said Tuesday it rejects the notion that the prior policy was supposed to be the norm, and pointed to a blog post from 2021 where Jassy noted Amazon would “continue to adjust” things as more information rolled in.
When announcing the updated policy earlier this year, Jassy wrote in a memo to staff that Amazon made its decision after observing what worked during the pandemic and talking to leaders at other companies. He said the company’s senior executives, known internally as the S-team, concluded employees tended to be more engaged in person and collaborate more easily.
But many workers haven’t been convinced. In May, hundreds of Amazon employees protested the new policy during a lunchtime demonstration at the company’s Seattle headquarters. At the time, an internal Slack channel that advocated for remote work had racked up 33,000 members.
Some employees have also been pushing the company to supply data that support Jassy’s claims. During the session, Jassy said the company’s leadership looked at the data it has available and among other things, he said they didn’t feel that meetings were as effective from home as they were before. He added there are a lot of scenarios where the company has made some of its biggest decisions without perfect data, pointing to examples like Amazon’s decision to pursue an online marketplace for sellers and AWS, its cloud computing unit.
In July, Amazon also rolled out a policy that requires some workers in smaller offices to move to main offices located in bigger cities, according to multiple media reports.
Amazon employs 1.4 million people worldwide but does not indicate how many of those work in office settings, as opposed to working at its warehouses and other sites.
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Either return to the office or go be successful at another company where you can work from home.
Agree.
There is 0 chance I am more productive working in an office. Perhaps others are different, but the number of office interruptions/distractions and communicating time saps a ton of my productivity. If I was still training then being in the office would be helpful to be able to ask questions easier and learn in person, but for established trained professionals, this is a dumb policy by Amazon and others.
Okay Matthew…good luck!
totally agree. the leaders get to make the policy. if you want to make policy, then set your career path on being one of those leaders. if you don’t want to follow policy, go find a job somewhere else.
“Disagree and commit” is one of the least useful management catchphrases I’ve ever had the misfortune to hear. No wonder their culture is entirely rotten and everyone wants to work at home instead.
As usual, it was okay to do what worked for the company during COVID without missing a beat but now the micro-managers want to keep their employees under their thumbs and disrupt their lives again after they made the concessions to work from home in the first place. It is a different world today and there is no reason that someone should need to drive someplace to do the same thing they can do from home. Businesses are beholden to their cities that have a tax base built-in for all of those employees to use restaurants, stores, and gas stations.
Agree 110%..Lilly is prime example locally of forcing highly skilled and high performing employees back to the office