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Amazon Employees Are Fighting on Slack About Returning to the Office (entrepreneur.com) 142

Posted by EditorDavid from the channeling-anger dept.
An anonymous reader shares this report from Entrepreneur: Amazon employees are fighting it out about the company's planned return to the office in Slack channels, according to Insider. First, employees created a Slack channel to fight against the policy. Then, a pro-office return group was formed, the outlet reported....

Per CNBC, "remote advocacy" became a common Slack channel status. However, some people who welcomed a return to office life fought back, Insider reported. Over 700 people joined a pro-return-to-office group. Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy. (By comparison, the pro-working remotely channel has around 28,000 members.)

"I look forward to the prospect of seeing more of my coworkers in the office," one person reportedly wrote in the channel. Another said that the company should try out the four-day workweek and swap out the remote-flexible schedule. Another message links to a 2021 article in the Harvard Business Review called: "Why You May Actually Want to Go Back to the Office."
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Amazon Employees Are Fighting on Slack About Returning to the Office More

Amazon Employees Are Fighting on Slack About Returning to the Office

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  • Pro-return group? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheMiddleRoad ( 1153113 ) on Saturday March 04, 2023 @06:07PM (#63343029)

    Made up of mangers and ass kissers.

    Let each manager manage their team based on needs. Amazon needs to grow up.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Arethan ( 223197 )

      Pretty much!

      Some people aren't great at working from home.
      Some people don't have any problems working from home.
      Some people get much more done when working from home.

      Each team should be able to work this out on their own. If they can't, the problem is likely a poor leader.

    • Re:Pro-return group? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Saturday March 04, 2023 @06:39PM (#63343107)

      Made up of man[a]gers and ass kissers.

      It's not that simple. I didn't used to grasp how anyone could prefer to work from the office - I certainly don't - but I've had a couple of my close coworkers tell me they really prefer it. I think with one guy it's mainly because of his young kids at home, while the other one just gets obviously happy when he can interact with people directly.

      Me, once or twice a week in the office is plenty - and full-time from home (as was the case for much of the past 2+ years) is not a hardship.

      But, having said all that - I do think a lot of the overt "pro-return" discussion is being driven by manager types, because that's what I see at my university.

      FTFY BTW...

      • Depends on the person and depends on the work.

        One thing I have noticed is that the correlation between people who want to be in the office and the people who benefit from it isn't as strong as anyone would like. Some people are fine at home. Others have a bit of a habit of spinning their wheels and getting nowhere fast without a bit of interaction to unstick them.

        A mix of quiet time (which may as well be at home) to dive in deep and implement stuff is useful, but so it time to talk to other people to figure

      • Then why not have these people go to the office and leave the rest of us be?

      • Re:Pro-return group? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by jythie ( 914043 ) on Sunday March 05, 2023 @01:26PM (#63344815)
        Oddly enough, I am really NOT a people person and hate socializing, but am still pro-return. There is a lot more cross pollination between projects in office since you are constantly picking up what other people are doing. I've found the offsite people end up with real blinders on, they do their specific task and don't know much else about the larger system. If you don't really care about the job, just want a paycheck, then WFH seems to work great. But if you want to know the larger picture, know what is going on and why, nothing seems to beat being in the office.
        • Encourage teams in your company to work with Slack (or similar). It will save time in meetings, and you can join other teams' slack groups as an observer. That is really helpful for solving that problem when working remote.
      • Your post matches my sentiments on the topic entirely.

    • Made up of mangers and ass kissers.

      A pro-return-to-office group, eh? How many of those 700 accounts are bots?

      Or if not bots, shills?

    • Extroverts who crave personal interactions and can't comprehend people who don't. Trust me, I have several of them in my friend group and they are perplexed at how I could stay home all day and not go insane.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jythie ( 914043 )
      Eh, at my company, now that we have remote, hybrid, and onsite groups to compare, we are finding that the remote and hybrid people tend to fall way behind (esp the new hires) and have serious problems with siloing knowledge. So it isn't just 'managers', it is also people who need to get work done.

  • "Think big" (Score:5, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday March 04, 2023 @06:17PM (#63343055) Journal

    Its description says employees need to "Think Big" about the return to office policy.

    LOL that is manager speak that means "we've got nothing."

    • Pretty much. When I look at the "big picture", I see a bunch of useless managers trying desperately to find a reason to continue their existence on the payroll.

  • One of our employees was responsible for hardware and software installations and support. We suspended new hardware installs during the pandemic, and only provided support remotely. Well, we are back in the install business. This employee is now complaining of the 4 hour one way commute, since they moved away during the pandemic. And these are multi-day installations, making sure everything works once completed and getting customer by off. Not sure what the thought was, since we had to get back into physica

    • If he's valuable, I wonder if it would make sense for your company to (at least offer to) provide a local studio apartment - as a flop for those days where he doesn't want to face the commute?

      • Stop trying to provide real solutions here. Business cat demands subservience!

      • In the past I had some coworkers and even a manager who lived very remotely. They'd come into the office once a month and be reimbursed for the hotel. Rather expensive I thought. My friend did this and stayed in someone's house rather than use the hotel. That said, these were often relatively important people who'd take years to train a replacement for.

        On the other hand, pre-pandemic, we had a coworker that the manager really wasn't fond of, was a terrible communicator, refused to talk to the person in t

  • You're going to need to pass laws. And you're going to have to do it despite tv ads from billionaires telling you you don't want to pass laws. Because your life and your comfort are not nearly as important as their property values.

    • Meh. I disagree. I switched to a 100% remote role over the pandemic, am a high performer, and being told I should be bucking for advancement. No one has asked me to move back to SV. Everyone is accommodating, and most people here are still working from home anyhow, so every meeting has a zoom/teams link.

      The only âpushbackâ(TM) I have encountered is that they want to fly the team in for a few onsite days once or twice a year, mostly so we can all meet in person and get some group socialization time

      • That's a pretty sane attitude, but realize that sanity, logic and reason are not exactly the main reasons why companies, and managers, do something. The human factor (ok, the reptilian brain factor) plays a big role here. These people are into the whole status game. That has nothing to do with capitalist logic, that has a lot to do with their fee-fees and how it hurts them if they can't treat you like something they own.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Remote work from the office (Score:3)

    by tbuskey ( 135499 ) on Saturday March 04, 2023 @07:48PM (#63343299) Journal

    Before the quarantine, I'd go into the office & chat on slack. I'm in Massachusetts, my boss is in North Carolina along with some other coworkers. My team was based in Beijing with other members in Italy and Brazil.

    Later, I switched to another team. My boss & a coworker are in India. Other team members are in Czechoslovakia, Germany, France, Israel. There is another in Massachusetts, but too far from "the office" to really commute.

    We regularly work with others in Australia, China, Poland, California, Washington, Oregon, Michigan. Now that I think of it, I don't think I ever worked on a project with anyone in the Massachusetts location as closely as I've worked with all the remotes.

    If you set things up to work remotely, you can do "round the clock engineering". If you have to go into the office to interact, you're going to limit your work circle.

    If you need "butts in seats" to manage, you either need to improve your management skills or empower your employees to do their work w/o you micromanaging.

     

    • Have one fully remote worker on the other side of the planet, the upside down part, and living a block from the beach. Used to have a leased office with 3 people in that location but the numbers dwindled and it was back to working from home. But after about 3 years of being at home with a nice home office he's decided to lease some office space again. Not sure if he's being reimbursed but I suspect not. He just needs the space for work set up, equipment, etc.

    • Yup, my boss is 2000 miles away from me, and I work with coworkers that far and further in both directions from me around the globe. Being in the office is mostly being on the same video chats, teams chats, and meetings Iâ(TM)m on at home. Even before the pandemic this was true, it would be silly for me to commute into the office all the time
  • ... for the amusement of the suits. You've seen them, walking through, showing their other suit buddies around like a cheerful zookeeper. Here, meet this guy! These are really hard to get, and we have 3! Expensive? Damnyoubet, but that's the cost of being at the forefront!

  • Why doesn't Amazon simply pay more for each day in office rather than issue all-or-nothing edicts? How much is Ass-In-Chair worth to the PHB's? I agree that perhaps there be say 2 "meeting days" where people come in, but let the rest be.

    • That would cost money. Not in the budget. Barb in accounting is already watching your spending with a microscope. Lmfao

      • Real estate costs are real money too. My current company was actually closing down offices and consolidating buildings before pandemic hit. Not Google with too much money to know what to do with of course, but real companies have bottom lines they have to look after. I know there's the conspiracy theory that the real estate owners are doing this, but most tech companies in California lease instead of own for tax purposes (megacorps like google, apple, microsoft are exceptions and not the norm).

        For us, we

    • This is virtually the same as paying less for remote work, which makes sense, and I'm OK with BTW.

      • And this is exactly the problem: People would actually be ok with it. Why do you think that wasn't ever offered? Offer people a 10% pay cut for 100% WFH and all you get is a shrug and "ok" in reply.

        People value their time more than their money. The younger the people, the more this is true.

  • I mean really, is this news for nerds.
  • I bet it is overwhelmingly middle managers and executives who want everybody back in the office lest everybody realizes what is not really such a big secret: that said managers and executives are little more than dead weight for the company.

  • After all, 700 people can't be wrong.

    I mean, there's no way those 28,000 workers could organize in a manner to maximize their negotiating power to insure that policies that have proven to be effective stay in force.

    Look, hanging one person out to dry is easy. 100 is harder, but 10,000 people, you are likely to run out of rope. Of course, you don't have to do any of that if these people push each other over the cliff in a panic not to fall themselves.

    • If only those people would organize in some way, they'd have real power. Companies in the US have spent a lot of time and effort to scare people away from unions; divide and conquer.

  • Argument is good: It's a constructive process for hashing out disagreement. Fight has negative connotations.

  • Problem is⦠(Score:3)

    by Huitzil ( 7782388 ) on Saturday March 04, 2023 @09:53PM (#63343569)
    We can fight return to office all we want. But decision making - the C suite and top management is very old school and they understand that their power is not on doing the heavy lifting but on maintaining the status quo through ritual and process. Big meetings, MBR, QBR, green light. All designed to maintain an air of expertise in the top ranks - continuing to reinforce that people at high levels of power somehow know better than the rest of us. It would not matter much but the problem is that ownership of companies also skews to the high ranks that mostly thrive on soft skill. It will take a generational shift - the next wave of promotions - to truly shift over to a new hybrid world. The gerontocracy mixed with corporate power will use its power to get us back into the office and continue the process of faux adulation for a few more years.

    • They better hurry, because the new wanted job perk isn't your company car, your company phone or having whatever toys or snacks at the office, but being spared the office. "100% home office" is that attracts the new generation of working people, and that's an easy promise to make for companies that don't have a considerable amount of their assets tied down in real estate that they somehow have to prop up. To these companies the WFH perk is a win-win situation. They only need a much smaller office in expensi

  • Where I live, Amazon just put a hold on their massive office construction project. They started a few years ago and it represents a huge economic impact on the area, which is 5 minutes from downtown Washington, D.C. Housing prices tripled, lots of new investment in residential and services (e,g, restaurants). Zillions of dollars in play.

    This HQ2 complex is, I believe, almost entirely about selling cloud services to the federal government. It's going to be full of sales and technical support people managing

  • So (Score:3)

    by Luckyo ( 1726890 ) on Sunday March 05, 2023 @12:56AM (#63343789)

    Unironic slacktivism?

    I'll let myself out.

  • Terms of employment - return or else (Score:3)

    by bsdetector101 ( 6345122 ) on Sunday March 05, 2023 @06:30AM (#63344081)
    Terms of employment - return to work if you want to keep your job or get fired/quit, get new one. Simple !!

    • In this economy? Dare ya!

      C'mon, fire me. It should be trivial to find a security expert with 20 years experience and a financial auditing and law background, right? Or hell, any security expert. Or at least someone who doesn't think TCP is the Chinese secret service.

  • Do they really want to make selecting those for the next round of layoffs super easy?

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