Amazon workers ‘horrified’ by management’s decision to return to work

When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced in September that the company’s employees would have to return to the office to work five days a week, he said executives have “observed” that staff culture and performance are better when employees are in the same place.

In a recent letter to the CEO, more than 500 Amazon employees said they did not want to have their lives turned upside down based on management’s vague observations. They want data.

“We were appalled to hear the non-data-based explanation you gave Amazon for imposing the five-day mandate,” employees wrote to Amazon Web Service CEO Matt Garman after a meeting about the policy change. The letter was received and first reported by: Reuters.

For the past 16 months, Amazon has allowed most office workers to work from home two days a week. Without providing any hard evidence, however, Jassy concluded that people “learn, model, practice and reinforce our culture” better in person.

While Amazon may have internal data supporting claims it has chosen not to share with its angry employees, academic research has often found that hybrid work environments are ideal setups for both workers and the company’s bottom line.

AND test published this year by economists from Stanford and several Chinese universities, including a study of 1,600 employees at a technology company, found that those who were allowed to work from home two days a week had higher job satisfaction and significantly lower quit rates than those who who had to go to office work five days a week. The study also found no evidence that working from home affects employee evaluations or the likelihood of promotion.

Before analysis company share quotations, a professor at the University of Melbourne discovered that allowing employees to work from home could be beneficial to the value of company shares. The study concluded that work-from-home arrangements “are positively associated with shareholder returns” and that “adopting these work-from-home arrangements is likely to deliver important productivity gains for U.S. corporations, rather than raising concerns about moral hazard.”

An Amazon employee’s recent letter to Garman came after a meeting in which the executive he reportedly told employees that if they don’t like the new policy, they can leave. Reuters reported that it claimed – much to the skepticism of employees who signed the letter – that 90 percent of workers it spoke to were satisfied with the return-to-work policy.

Anonymous for a change questionnaire A survey of Amazon employees conducted by a professional networking firm found that 91 percent of employees were dissatisfied with the new policy.