Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

There’s absolutely no way that Amazon employees are more efficient at home.

Nothing about the company’s organizational structure or resources are set up to be optimized for this.

It’s like asking someone to play tennis, but you gave them a baseball bat.

I worked in digitalisation for a Danish city during Covid. Since I was the HR “data guy” I worked on every sort of metrics for them and sometimes had to sit through meetings just in case someone needed a technical explanation. I think that happened twice, but it’s been some years since. Anyway, I got to see the data on employees working from home.

The short story is that efficiency and productivity went up but “hours worked” went down. Well, “hours spent active at the computer” and by that I mean not just keeping teams greens but actually doing things, went down. Which was taken to mean work, even though it could’ve been people doing their social media, shopping or whatever. The key take away for most of the decision makers involved was that productivity increased. Then they do the law required AMR and psychological evaluations that we do here in Denmark. It’s basically a questionnaire where you rate your mental well being, how the physical environment is and so on. For office workers the physical part is mostly about the air quality, but in a municipality you have employees who are physically assaulted from time to time, so the results can be pretty wild.

You might expect that some of the groups working with Alzheimer, or some of the more violently mentally ill, patients. Employees who work in the department which removes children from bad parents. Such groups. Would be absolute outliners in these sort of analytics, and they were. The one group who scored higher on unhappiness, stress and a few other parameters were middle managers. So during Covid it was apparently worse to be a middle manager than someone who gets physically assaulted.

Anyway, the positive reports were sort of buried. Unless you’ve worked in public service you probably don’t know what that means, but it basically comes down to bureaucrats vs politicians. So you might have someone with a candidate (or several) degrees in public management and a couple of decades of experience advice a janitor who is popular enough to have been elected to office for whatever reason. Obviously the bureaucracy wins. So they all went back to the office to keep the middle managers happy.

I certainly don’t know how it’s like at Amazon, but I hope you can use my anecdotal story to see that it’s not always about productivity. Especially because measuring productivity in hours spent in office doesn’t show the same output as it would for someone standing at an assembly line.

If nothing else, home offices can be a lot quieter than the usual mix of plague ward and bazaar that defines modern work environments.

This is a big factor for me, especially as someone who has been doing software development for a long time. When I first started it was typical to have individual offices, or at worst office sharing where you shared an office with one other dev who was likely trying to keep distractions to a minimum as much as you were.

Now almost every workplace is an open office plan, hot desk swapping hellscape.

If offices were like they generally were when I first started I would be a lot more personally pro-RTO, but the way they are these days I much prefer to work at home in peace and quiet.

(Of course, the peace and quiet aspect will vary based on the particulars of everyone's homes/families/etc).

Traffic is of course the other major factor. As someone who lives in Southern California, the commute time from where I live to where I work is either 15 minutes or an hour and a half based on traffic congestion and its pretty freeing to not have to worry so much about preplanning your commute to minimize the likelihood of landing on the bad side of this.

I say this as someone who’s worked from home for the last six years of my career pre-Covid

I would never want to work at Amazon or Facebook or whatever while being remote. You’re leaving half of the benefit of being at those places on the table.