Throngs of employees from Amazon have been riled into a storm of fury as the company leadership chooses to start canceling established remote work arrangements, with quite a few putting out threats of quitting and many other drafting petitions in reaction to a recent announcement that they must report into the office for a total of three times per week.
Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon, stated in a memo being sent out to employees late last week that the company thinks “teams tend to find ways to work through hard and complex trade-offs faster” when they are all situated in the same physical space. Very quickly in the wake of the announcement, hundreds of staffers for Amazon started flooding into an internal Slack channel labeled Remote Advocacy; as of writing the channel sported well over 14,000 members in the channel, as explained in a report from Business Insider.
Close to 80% of the workers present in the channel made the claim that they would begin looking for new jobs due to the inception of this new policy. “This is going to be absolute chaos and make everyone’s work distracted for probably a quarter, maybe longer,” expressed one of the very angry employees. “It’s hard to be productive with so much uncertainty injected into our lives.”
This shift back to a more traditional work arrangement, however, is taking place just as Amazon tries to downsize because of macroeconomic tumult and a drop in consumer demand which followed the lockdown-induced recession. Recently, Amazon fired close to 18,000 employees over the past few months and implemented a freeze on all incremental hires for the corporate workforce.
The employees in the Slack channel nevertheless drew up petitions against the new policy forcing a return to the office. “We, the undersigned Amazonians, are responding by petitioning for the right to choose where to work, including remote locations,” explained an early version of the paper, according to Business Insider. The petition included survey data which found 56% of Amazon employees wish for “monthly sync-ups in the office,” while just 31% want to go back to working in the office on a schedule of one to two days per week.
The company’s employees seem to heavily prefer arrangements of remote work because of the time saved by avoiding commutes, as well as the extreme flexibility allowed for balancing work and personal matters, as reported by a poll coming from Gallup. The costs for employers, however, can often heavily outweigh the benefits of attracting and keeping talented employees.
