Laszlo Bock, a consultant and former Google senior executive, compared Andy Jassy’s demand that Amazon employees spend five days a week in the office to ordering a regular order at a restaurant.
Say you can choose a hamburger at a regular joint, and you all of a sudden go for the grilled chicken, Bogue suggests. Chicken is okay, “not better than hamburger, not bad.” Naturally, you’ll go back to the burger or the norm.
“You go back to whatever you’re comfortable with,” Bogue said Good luck. The Gretel The AI data platform cofounder is a corporate culture expert and was a senior people executive at Google from 2006 to 2016, a period during which the tech giant was named a best company to work for dozens of times. “Why would you ever eat a chicken sandwich again?” He asked.
It’s a classic story of executives falling back into the familiar schedule of working entirely in-person after five years of trying or waffling on flexible, remote or hybrid schedules. Amazon joined the ranks this week as Jassi increased the mandatory number of office days from three to five in a memo to employees on Monday. Amazon responded to requests for comment by stating: Good luck Said to note.
The memo, posted on the company’s website, emphasized the importance of in-person visits as a catalyst for company culture and collaboration. It also outlined restructuring to reduce staffing at management levels.
Bock called the move “a triumph of traditional management over innovative management,” explaining that the latter style is more difficult and requires more data to implement.
Why do managers hate flexible working?
If managed well, hybrid work can be a successful boost to productivity, Bok points out Preliminary studiesWork from companies like Atlassian It hosts social events, and the success of employers who implement focus days. In the early days of the pandemic, production increased after companies tried their plans. In turn, the staff responded positively to it, Bach, the teacher, said The New York Times Best seller Work Rules!: Insights from Inside Google to Change How You Live and Lead.
Yet to really do hybrid work well requires resources, a clear plan, and above all, buy-in. Most companies don’t want to put in the effort without guaranteed results, so the potential benefits of mixed-method work are reduced. In the absence of an effective flexible schedule, the downsides of hybrid work became more apparent — including a diffuse culture, a sense of disconnect, a common culture and managers who don’t feel in control, he said.
“There’s no clear, overwhelming evidence that this is good from an organization’s perspective,” Bock said, and because it’s a change, executives need evidence to change course. “Employees love it” because it respects their autonomy and independence. But when employers, especially large companies like Amazon, struggle because of their size, they lose out when they opt out of hybrid projects.
In a sense, companies stumbled into hybrid work, abandoning a new strategy once it stopped being attractive. Or in other words, executives have “created a self-fulfilling prophecy that is now dragging people back to the office and screaming.”
Will Amazon Really Lose Talent?
Amazon’s announcement wasn’t exactly met with open arms. As one person posted on Slack, some employees expressed dismay and disapproval at the order, which was a sign of “backsliding.” Business Insider.
Companies run the risk of losing top talent when they avoid flexibility, but Bock thinks Amazon isn’t taking a terrible gamble here. “Very few people are voting with their feet,” he said, adding that the strategy won’t hurt the company in the long run. Although this is controversial and angers many remote or hybrid Amazonians, he notes that many will not leave. Even as successful companies issue polarizing ultimatums, they will continue to have a large pool of talent, he said.
As for the new management strategy, Bock sees it as a way to micromanage. It’s “a very clarion call for productivity, but it’s really a call for managers to focus on doing things better,” he said. He cited Google’s Rule of Seven, which states that it does not assign managers to teams of fewer than seven employees, to disperse their time and reduce involvement within the span of control.
Even so, with all these changes, he “imagines[s] This will be a very stressful time for Amazon managers. Although fueled online, this is not unusual for Amazon. A tight-knit corporate culture rooted in intense and close-knit management that “reflects their values,” he said.
Bock called the memo “absolutely expected and actually very thoughtful” for their data-driven approach, and said more companies would follow suit. He added that this approach would be better in the long run because humans love social contact and can lose it during poorly executed hybridization programs.
Instead of issuing a mandate like a bank CEO deeming RTO important, Amazon ties its mandate to internal data and culture, Bock explained. While some companies tried to wait out the (yet to come) fall to get their office way, others went for the boost.”Boil the frog” way, both are not that useful
But Amazon will get its way. “They’re going to force it … they’re going to do it,” Bogue said. “No doubt they’re going to measure it and monitor it” and “they’re going to fire people for non-compliance,” he says.
More decrees may follow. Amazon is a bellwether of sorts for others, and “all technology has moved in this direction,” Bogue noted. In other words, “Most companies don’t put in the effort, and they just order a cheeseburger.”
