Amazon employees have been pushing back against the company’s return to office policy for months — and it seems the ecommerce giant’s CEO has had enough.
All the data I’ve seen used to justify RTO policies has involved difficulties onboarding new employees. It is harder to instill a work culture in people who you aren’t around in-person. It’s harder to learn all the miscellaneous things that you take for granted after having been at a place for a year.
But even that data didn’t account for companies attempting to solve that problem. And honestly, it’s not that complicated:
Make it easy for a person to discover the information they need.
Ensure teams are given tools (and a means to quickly procure needed tools) to collaborate and given time to socialize, document their internal knowledge, and that the expectation of doing those things is communicated.
Don’t exempt people working in person from these expectations.
I worked remotely at a company where my team was entirely remote. Even after ownership changed and they mandated RTO, every member of the team was in a different location, so we had to keep working as though everyone was remote. This meant making time to socialize, making sure we had team documentation that was easy to access and easy to understand, time set aside to work in groups remotely, collaboration tools that we actually used, and a reasonable budget for WFH supplies (headphones, microphones, keyboards, monitors, even a desk/chair - heck, I could have gotten a Wacom tablet to use in whiteboarding sessions if I hadn’t had one already). Even when everyone on the team except for me was laid off, I was able to direct the new people responsible to the various places where system and process knowledge was documented.
I can’t name a single thing that would have been easier to resolve in-person. The only exception I can even think of would have been a complete hardware failure with my company laptop, since then I would have been unable to work until a replacement arrived, but no company should contract with a hardware vendor whose failure rates are high enough for that to be a factor.
Try explaining that to a group of execs who haven’t been individual contributors their entire adult lives, though.
Wait! That would require actually training new hires and would be expensive! Upper Management prefers to make existing employees do it for free as an additional task that was never on the job description.
All the data I’ve seen used to justify RTO policies has involved difficulties onboarding new employees. It is harder to instill a work culture in people who you aren’t around in-person. It’s harder to learn all the miscellaneous things that you take for granted after having been at a place for a year.
But even that data didn’t account for companies attempting to solve that problem. And honestly, it’s not that complicated:
I worked remotely at a company where my team was entirely remote. Even after ownership changed and they mandated RTO, every member of the team was in a different location, so we had to keep working as though everyone was remote. This meant making time to socialize, making sure we had team documentation that was easy to access and easy to understand, time set aside to work in groups remotely, collaboration tools that we actually used, and a reasonable budget for WFH supplies (headphones, microphones, keyboards, monitors, even a desk/chair - heck, I could have gotten a Wacom tablet to use in whiteboarding sessions if I hadn’t had one already). Even when everyone on the team except for me was laid off, I was able to direct the new people responsible to the various places where system and process knowledge was documented.
I can’t name a single thing that would have been easier to resolve in-person. The only exception I can even think of would have been a complete hardware failure with my company laptop, since then I would have been unable to work until a replacement arrived, but no company should contract with a hardware vendor whose failure rates are high enough for that to be a factor.
Try explaining that to a group of execs who haven’t been individual contributors their entire adult lives, though.
Wait! That would require actually training new hires and would be expensive! Upper Management prefers to make existing employees do it for free as an additional task that was never on the job description.