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Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

(www.bloomberg.com)
283 points belter | 4 comments | 13 Nov 24 21:16 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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no_wizard ◴[13 Nov 24 21:45 UTC] No.42130354[source]▶
For a company that is supposedly data driven like Amazon likes to tout, they have zero data that RTO would provide the benefits they claim[0]. They even admitted as much[1].

I wouldn't be shocked if one day some leaked memos or emails come to light that prove it was all about control and/or backdoor layoffs, despite their PR spin that it isn't (what competent company leader would openly admit this?)

[0]: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/over-500-amazon-...

[1]: https://fortune.com/2023/09/05/amazon-andy-jassy-return-to-o...

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changoplatanero ◴[13 Nov 24 21:46 UTC] No.42130377[source]▶
How would you even gather data to support this? You can't a/b test company culture.
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no_wizard ◴[13 Nov 24 21:50 UTC] No.42130431[source]▶
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.

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changoplatanero ◴[13 Nov 24 22:34 UTC] No.42130946[source]▶
> 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.

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no_wizard ◴[13 Nov 24 22:47 UTC] No.42131065[source]▶
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?

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jacobr1 ◴[13 Nov 24 23:57 UTC] No.42131599[source]▶
>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?

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1. no_wizard ◴[14 Nov 24 00:17 UTC] No.42131742[source]▶
>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.

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2. jacobr1 ◴[14 Nov 24 17:42 UTC] No.42138818[source]▶
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.

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3. no_wizard ◴[14 Nov 24 19:37 UTC] No.42140254[source]▶
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.

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4. jacobr1 ◴[15 Nov 24 17:06 UTC] No.42148718{3}[source]▶
> 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.