Amazon CEO’s Caution: Defying Return-to-Office Policy Could Have Consequences
The return-to-office policy at Amazon has been met with resistance from staff for months, and it appears CEO Andy Jassy has had enough.
Jassy stated that it was “past the time to disagree and commit” to the policy, which mandates that corporate workers work three days per week, during a pre-recorded internal Q&A session earlier this month. One of Amazon’s leadership tenets is “disagree and commit,” which was a statement frequently said by Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder and current executive chairman.
It probably won’t work out for you at Amazon if you can’t disagree and commit, according to Jassy, who also said that it wasn’t fair for certain employees to work three days a week while others don’t.
Business Insider broke the news of his remarks first, and Amazon later picked up the story.
The current office attendance requirement, which was announced in February and came into force in May, is a change from Amazon’s previous policy, which gave leaders the authority to decide how their teams worked.
The business, however, stated on Tuesday that it disputes the idea that the previous policy was intended to be the standard and cited a blog entry from 2021 by Jassy in which she stated that Amazon would “continue to adjust” things as new information came in.
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Workplace Policy
Jassy stated in a statement to the team when introducing the modified policy earlier this year that Amazon made its choice after looking at what was successful during the pandemic and consulting with other business executives. The S-team, the company’s senior executives, came to the conclusion that people tend to be more engaged and cooperative in person.
Nonetheless, a lot of employees remain unconvinced. In May, hundreds of Amazon workers demonstrated against the new rule at the company’s Seattle headquarters during lunchtime. An internal Slack channel that supported remote work at the time had 33,000 subscribers.
Some employees have also demanded that the business provide evidence to back up Jassy’s assertions.
Jassy claimed that during the meeting, the company’s management examined the data at their disposal and discovered, among other things, that they no longer thought remote meetings were as productive as they once were.He continued, citing instances where the business has taken some of its most important choices without complete information.
He gave the examples of Amazon’s decision to launch an online marketplace for sellers and AWS, its cloud computing division. According to several media reports, Amazon reportedly implemented a rule in July requiring some employees in smaller offices to transfer to main headquarters in larger cities.
Although it claims to employ 1.4 million people worldwide, Amazon does not specify how many of them work in offices as opposed to warehouses and other locations.
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Source: ABC News
