Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.

Sure you can. Why can't you?

Its lack of imagination and inability for upper management leadership to even consider that the way they "always done things" may no longer be the best way, and they need to evolve with the times.

For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.

Thats off the top of my head. Never mind that there are actually more scientific approaches that can be used than what I've suggested, and there are researchers that are clamoring to do this as well.

Even if you did, you couldn't do a proper A/B test without forcing at least some people into the office.

Let’s just ignore the quarterly employee feedback, historical performance records of employees before, during, and after COVID-19 lockdowns, business performance before, during , after COVID-19 lockdowns; and rates of attrition in across organizations and teams…

There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.

I feel like the 4 day work week experiments at various companies suggest you could do control/treatment tests for RTO too.

https://www.npr.org/2024/02/27/1234271434/4-day-workweek-suc...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/nov/04/microsoft...

There were countless natural experiments available from teams that had differing levels of in-person attendance; as well as teams that either were or were not colocated, and teams that took steps (or didn't) to align their in-person appearances.

After all, there _were_ teams that never pivoted to WFH.

There were some teams that never stopped coming to the office, due to sensitive aspects of their work.

And there's a boatload of data from centralized project management and ticketing systems, as well as centralized source repositories.

The data was absolutely available for data-driven arguments.

Unfortunately you'd probably have to discount the teams that never switched to WFH. The same reasons that likely drove that decision would mean they're unlikely to be good comparators to teams that had a choice.

> For instance, find a group of teams that work on a similar function, have some of the teams RTO, and have some WFH, and see if there is any tangible difference in the results and what they are.

I'm not sure I buy this. In my mind the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc. Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.

Firstly, there are better more scientific ways than I what I proposed at thinking about it for maybe 30 seconds.

Secondly, you're saying this

>In my mind...

There's still no objective metric being cited?

>the downsides to permanent working from home are these intangible things like team cohesion, speed of onboarding, effective cross functional collaboration, etc.

But we can prove these things can work well remotely. If they didn't, remote only companies would have such a higher bar to clear and that would be proven already. Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote. Zapier has grown strong and steady, 100% remote, Deel has grown quickly since 2019, also 100% remote etc.

Clearly none of these businesses have issues collaborating.

>Some of these issues wouldn't manifest themselves in a measurable way until more than a year later.

So measure it as long as it takes. 1-2 years is a blip comparatively, and lots of companies already have internal data they could use to make this determination: look at employee performance and satisfaction rates before they worked from home and compare it to after they worked from home. Lots and lots of people worked at the same place before WFH became far more common, and after it became far more common. I imagine this is true at Amazon as anywhere else it would be.

What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.

Do you think this would even be a conversation if it was the inverse?

If any corporation has done this, it's Amazon. I suspect they just don't give a damn about the needs of employees beyond how it impacts revenue.

How are you so sure this data is favorable to remote work?

It depends a lot.

I've worked with people in person quite a lot--some of which admittedly pre-dated current communication technologies. And some of which was certainly augmented by a fair number of face to face meetings that sort of fell off the table between COVID and tech budget cuts.

But I'd say that, in general, some amount of meeting people locally (including going into an office if people you work with are actually there) is beneficial.

because that's what the data says

Can you show me, please?

I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.

Forgive for not understanding, but what do you mean by 'because it doesn't happen'?

The studies don't happen or something else?

It would be nice for that group to chime in and actually engage in the conversation for once.

> I don't understand why CEOs and executives who lurk on here don't just come out and say what the deal is. I can only assume because that doesn't happen...

Which part of that was unclear?

There's been numerous articles about it:

https://www.vox.com/recode/23129752/work-from-home-productiv...

https://www.nber.org/papers/w30267

https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4443825-telework-prod...

https://hubstaff.com/blog/remote-work-deeper-focus-fewer-int...

https://atlassianblog.wpengine.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/0...

https://www.opm.gov/telework/documents-for-telework/2023-rep...

>What I find entirely humorous about this is its executives that want hybrid / RTO by a large margin, and comparatively few employees want hybrid / RTO and prefer working from home.

Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job. A functioning team can go remote, but over team, many companies are starting to see where it falls down. For example, you don't have a culture of writing things down and decisions are made it meetings, or informal conversations. Tons of a context gets lost. Also discussions must be serialized. Most "planning" sucks over remote meetings because of this. Things like breakout rooms help parallelize discussion - but companies that are async first can run rings around the "marathon meeting" type cultures. Working in person smooths over many of the inefficiencies and minor disconnects this causes.

And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process. In person, people can somewhat onboard by "learning through osmosis" and the natural connections of just meeting people, building report, helping them out. A few zoom training sessions and then getting tossed in the deep end is going to work for some people, not for others and then will bring an organizational toll over time. Companies like GitLab have remote-first ways to approach this ... but without similar investment, things will degrade.

And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team. If you don't have good async processes, written culture, or metrics, managers can get in the trap of "not knowing what everyone is doing," not being sure if they are on track for success or failure. Plenty of ways to avoid this, but plenty of things are much harder without approaching them from a remote-first mindset. Interpersonal issues on the team: old playbook, take them out to lunch for coffee for an informal conversation. New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said. Checkin on sales to see if the quarter is on track: walk down the sales area and assess the vibe. Tons of a excitement and backslapping and gongs, no worries; everyone looking glum, I need a have a deep conversation with the regional manager. New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?

> Gitlab did great in their IPO, and they're 100% remote.

Gitlab is down 47% all time since their IPO.

> I can only assume because that doesn't happen, they would rather not say, which in turn actually says volumes.

If a CEO posted on here, “Here’s data that shows RTO was better for us” would that change anyone’s mind here?

No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it.

Whats the "I can only assume because that doesn't happen..."

what are you assuming doesn't happen? I think I might be overly dense, but I still don't follow.

> people who hate RTO would continue to hate it

It's honestly mindblowing that we're having so much difficulty parsing multiple optima. RTO works. WFH works. Hybrid works. They don't each work for everyone or every company. But these are preferences, not hard and fast rules.

It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.

Why don’t CEOs just come out and actually say why RTO is such a priority.

I thought that was clear. I suppose it was not. Thanks for your patience.

Edit: to be clear I don’t believe any of the messsging so far. “Collaboration, water-cooler talks” etc. that’s all bullshit.

I thought you were talking about Amazon data. I don't think this is something that can be said generally - I have been in companies that worked much better in person, and in companies that wouldn't work without remote. I have no idea which one is Amazon.

Ultimately though, I think this is a cultural choice - the companies that worked well in person specifically hired only people who wanted to work in that way. Some changed their mind during the pandemic, and they were asked to move on. I don't think they were wrong. I was one of these who went away, and I joined a remote first global corporate with people from all over the world. I had a blast working there and nothing like it would be possible otherwise.

So I don't think Amazon is wrong in choosing their own way - even if we don't like it. It's style; it's like if we were criticizing their brand colors.

>Converting an in-person culture to a remote culture can be hard and many companies haven't done a good job.

The crux of it seems to be an inability to adapt then. Excuses or no excuse, that is the problem. Why are rewarding companies that aren't adapting?

>And onboarding and training new people is much harder remotely ... if you don't actually have an onboarding process.

you hit the nail on the head here. This means investing in your employees and taking training / onboarding seriously. Companies got too used to this being done by osmosis and effectively not having to pay for it. Again, seems like failure to adapt is at fault.

>And third, it is that is much harder to gain visibility and micromanage a remote team.

Last thing in the world any good worker wants its to be micromanaged. To be honest, I ask, why do we want this?

>New playbook, avoid or have an awkward conversation over a 30 minute 1:1 zoom, where you could be being recorded so nothing of consequence is said.

If you can't say anything on the record of consequence I suspect whatever it is you're saying shouldn't be said at all. How is this bad? What on earth could be said before that can't be said now?

>New playbook: review salesforce data that you know is bullshit and are frustrated you can't figure out why things aren't like they used to be. Is it because all the new hires we brought on don't seem to be productive? Did remote kill everyone's mojo? Are my middle managers able to hold their team to account?

you're measuring the wrong thing or otherwise not going about this productively to begin with. It seems like there is a lot of ineffective management going on here. Good vibes are meaningless, they simply make someone feel better perhaps, but you really think because some sales people are having a good time it means sales are good? I don't think I'd rely on that, feels like a recipe for bad surprises.

Also, you could just talk to people, like before. There's no rule against talking to people who work from home.

These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me. Seems like asking management to adapt is the real sin. Yet these same management types decry so much about everyone else getting accommodated. I remember a time when people said 'businesses adapt or die'. Yet changing tides of the workforce, businesses don't want to adapt, and are leveraging any power dynamic they have over labor to make sure they don't have to.

It would, if such data existed, and was proven to be reasonably obtained in a nonpartisan fashion. Same metric I used for the productivity studies of working from home. The ones with the most data and least bias indicated an up and to the right trajectory of both productivity and satisfaction.

Everyone until very recently was down some N% from their high.

I don't think this speaks to bad fundamentals in Gitlabs business.

Also, they did have a good IPO, people cashed out at a good number all told. I don't think its mutually exclusive

For Amazon, the apparently have really good tooling to examine what people, at least coders, are doing.

This is from presumably an Amazon employee :

"Amazon has these numbers easily accessible as reports on their code systems runnable at any manager level, and many other ways to inspect what the team is doing and the risks you might have. I find them useful. Bus factor is one way to think of it. Another is it lets you spot silos, or engineers who aren't working with others, or places where you can't as easily move engineers around (so you can fix that).

Some developers fear fungability, they think that that one system only they know is job security. I see it the other way, I see that as a technical risk, but also a thing that might be keeping a great engineer from working on more important projects. Or the way to work on something else when you get fed up with that one system you hate."

from :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42111260

I wasn't, but thats largely because they haven't produced any, by their own admission, and they aren't currently from what anyone - even those inside the company - gathering any in a rigorous manner.

> No, people who hate RTO would continue to hate it

What a microchasm of today. People don’t like being told “I’m smarter than you and this is the best thing.” Just isn’t in the cards anymore.

I hate RTO, no doubt about it, but I also would admit that it’s less productive if the data emerged to support that conclusion. Personally, I’d be happy to have the economy take a small hit in productivity in order for a lot of workers to have much better lives.

> You can't a/b test company culture.

Trip.com did exactly that, A/B testing fully in office with hybrid work schedules and found that the data strongly supported hybrid schedules.

They found zero reduction in employee productivity or career outcomes, and a 35% reduction in turnover in the hybrid cohort.

So, yeah, you absolutely can A/B test company culture.

(One might argue that Amazon already A/B tests company culture -- the culture within AWS and Amazon Retail are wildly different.)

I mean you’re the one who brought them up to bolster your argument in favor of remote work.

Do you think it speaks to good fundamentals in Gitlabs business? Or is it mostly irrelevant and tells us nothing useful?

I can assure you that any data found would certainly be determined by you to be unreasonably obtained in a partisan fashion. You want the numbers to go up and to the right!

https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...

> It’s true that widespread studies based on standard measures of efficiency have found that fully remote employees are 10% to 20% less productive than those working on company premises.

The surely partisan and unreasonably obtained data:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3846680

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kqbngD8pemqxAkZmWCOQ32Yk6PX...

> It's like people arguing over whether driving on the left or right side is better. It doesn't matter. As long as everyone in a system is in sync, it works.

I 100% agree with you and this is a great analogy.

The biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane.”

As a boss you have the right to treat people like shit but you shouldn't complain about not being able to fill vacancies that way.

> biggest problem of all is that the left-lane (remote) contingent will say, “I don’t care what lane you drive in as long as I get to drive in the left lane."

Which obviously doesn't work. But what also doesn't work is companies pretending they're WFH or hybrid friendly when they're really not.

The evidence shows that WFH is more productive. There’s multiple papers on this topic at this point. Including one from the NBER as I recall. https://www.nber.org/papers/w30866

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...

Business research is quite non partisan, it’s about making money in the end.

https://www.weforum.org/stories/2021/06/working-from-home-co...

There’s multiple studies done at this point that very clearly show WFH benefits.

No, my point was that people who like remote work like to believe that as long as they are working where they want to work (their homes) then everyone else is happy as well if they can work where they want to work.

They miss the point that Person A working in an office while Person B works at home is generally not what Person A wants. Person A generally wants to work with other people in the same physical space.

The pro-remote crowd does not mind upsetting others as long as they can continue to work from home.

> There is plenty of data to support why forced RTO makes no sense.

It makes a lot of sense for property owners to enforce policies to maintain the value of their real estate.

I don't like it, but it makes sense.

That's the same logical fallacy that makes people think that small scale UBI experimental results apply if rolled out to the entire society. There are systemic and emergent effects that are not accounted for, and the only way to actually do the science is to make a copy of society and only do the change for one of the copies.

(which is obviously impossible, which is GP's point)

That’s making a lot of assumptions about Person A

So what you are saying is “there’s no possible way to collect data on this, so just trust me even though I’m bias”

Do you think there are no Person As in the world?

And you think I’m not making assumptions about Person B?

Why does anyone have to cater to Person A? Frankly if people can work where they want to work that’s fine, but you’re saying that because one person wants to be in office their entire team does too?

It speaks to a company having a successful exit which most would deem a massive success

The problem with both those studies is one only focuses on workers in Asia - with no comparative studies in US, Canada or Western Europe- and the other gets all its negative data from an IT outsourcing firm in India, and even notes that within the US productivity rose by at least 2%. Its own summary is misleading when you read it.

I’ve seen both of these as initially RTO advocates rolled them out a lot but lots of folks poked holes in the research, especially since the bigger body of studies around the topic disagree with the takeaways by a wide margin.

Believe it or not, that’s not at all what I’m saying.

Let’s say Person A wants to be in the office with other people also in that office. Then Person B wants to work in their home and doesn’t care where other people work.

If Person B gets their way (thru remote work) then Person A is dissatisfied. If Person A gets their way (thru companywide RTO) then Person B is dissatisfied.

My point is Why should anyone have to cater to either Person B or Person A?

Whichever choice a company makes, someone is going to be dissatisfied. There are no right or wrong choices here, just choices.

The employees have choices, too. They can get new jobs or they can deal with a situation they find dissatisfying in some way.

That's a lot of words to shove in my mouth. At least buy me dinner first.

To be clear, the examples I gave aren't those of what I think effective management should, but rather an amalgamation of the though processes I've observed.

> These examples all seem outdated on both sides, and not realistic to me

They are indeed outdated ... but I think common, and help explain some of the management/IC disconnect here at the companies struggling to adapt. There are plenty of shitty companies out there will middle management operating on inertia. It is one of the (many) reasons working on startups can be so rewarding.

There are great remote companies, in-person companies, hybrid companies. There are companies great as some aspects and not others. The trend I think for the companies doing it well, is intentional process and culture design. And importantly regular iteration to improve. At it only gets harder at scale.

This is more reasonable, and I agree with it.

I think people should be able to work where they are most productive, assuming the work can reasonably accommodate such things, and business process and culture should adapt / grow accordingly.

If a bunch of people really want to work in an office together, go ahead. Want to work from home? go ahead. Want to work hybrid? Have at it.

The problem is, business culture hates worker flexibility, but sure loves executive flexibility.

To add to this, the IMF did a broad global meta analysis of all the different WFH studies, and found it was at worst neutral, and at best increased productivity by a median of 2-9%.

That's the most objective study I've been able to find, largely because it aggregates all available research at the time of its publication together and does a reasonably good job of making sense of it.

you're bypassing the thing I'm saying though, in that all the examples, real or perceived, are limitations of the person thinking of them, but not actual limitations of the medium of which work is done.

You can hand wave away the conversation a bit more with what you're saying at the end, but that doesn't really get to the core of the issue here.

The NBER study you linked seems to say that WFH saves workers 2 hours per week not that it increases their at-work productivity. It goes on to say that they claim to work more but it doesn’t say they actually get more done as a result.

> There will be a 5% productivity boost in the post-pandemic economy due to re-optimized working arrangements and less time spent commuting, NBER adds.

If this isn’t good enough do search yourself. There’s multiple papers and analyses by this point.

And these are all analyses to satisfy the all important business productivity goals of our corporations.

For humans, the actual workers? The saved time on commute, improved quality of life and invigoration of local markets far outweigh those corporate gains.

This feels like a wild take, and I haven’t seen anyone espouse the view that WFH people don’t mind upsetting others, other than you so far. I’ve seen people fervently against mandated RTO, and I understand that. I see people saying they want WFH as an option - also valid. The option to have WFH does not mean they’re advocating for others to not be able to be in office or hybrid. I’ve worked from home for years now, maybe about 10? And I don’t care at all if anyone wants to work in an office - go for it! I get it, and it’s not for me.

> limitations of the person thinking of them, but not actual limitations of the medium of which work is done.

I think we are agreeing here. That was the point of my examples, demonstrating limited thinking from the execs demanding RTO. I was trying to show it wasn't just them being totally dumb, they have valid reasons ... but their narrowness in conceiving of the solution is driving them to do things they way the've done them before. And in many cases that might even be the (local maxima) rational thing, under the assumption they don't have a good mechanism to change the organization dynamics. That overall is a tragedy and lack of leadership. But I think the core issue is exactly that: the limitation in thought of how to structure a group of people to do work. That there are organizations that do it well, seems to me to be an existence proof that it can be done much better and the leaders in organizations going back to RTO should be trying harder to adapt rather than fight remote work. One example of why it often is so naive and wasteful is because the assumptions of teams working together in the same space is often wrong at bigger companies. Plenty of people go to office just to spend all day in zoom meetings talking to colleagues spread out in different offices - that has all the disadvantages of remote work ... but none of the benefits! It isn't even doing office work right, which can have its own advantages too, it just is a total leadership failure.

> I haven’t seen anyone espouse the view that WFH people don’t mind upsetting others, other than you so far

You may not have seen it, but you yourself do it just a few sentences later:

> And I don’t care at all if anyone wants to work in an office - go for it! I get it, and it’s not for me.

If you and I work together and my preference is to work in an office with other people in that office then you don't seem to mind upsetting me.

And again, it is not bad to upset me. It is your right to upset me. Just the same as it is my right to upset you by requiring you to come into an office.

Neither option is right and neither option is wrong. It's just that each one upsets a different person.

Maybe my energy came across a bit off, and I apologize. I’m all for you working in an office - and if that’s something you and I would need to figure out if we worked together, I’d be happy to find a middle ground. I don’t think anyone should be required to do one or the other, and I think a team needs to be able to find compromises to get to a healthy place for all involved.

Ideally, managers and employers would work to team people up who aligned on those views, and that’s unrealistic to expect for more so than to hope for.

> I don’t think anyone should be required to do one or the other

Yes, you do not think that because you are OK upsetting me.

I am OK with upsetting you by encouraging a full-company RTO policy.

The compromise is that one of us deals with it or gets a new job.