Amazon Makes It Harder for Disabled Employees to Work from Home

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...

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.

> 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?

>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?