Quarrel over return to office
Email threat enrages Amazon employees
By Diana Dittmer
08/11/2023 7:03 p.m
In order to persuade its employees to return to the office, Amazon is fighting with tougher bandages in the USA. Home office fans are directly asked by e-mail to show their presence. Otherwise there is a risk of dismissal. A wave of indignation breaks out: “Is that supposed to scare people?”
With too many workers still working almost entirely from home, Amazon has apparently decided to take a more aggressive approach to bringing them back to the office. Selected employees in the US were informed by email this week that they “are not currently meeting (the) expectations”. The employer’s instruction is unequivocal: “We assume that you will now come into the office three or more days a week.” The “Financial Times” (FT), which was the first to report it, quoted from an email it had received. An alleged excerpt of the letter is circulating on the Internet.
The e-mail triggered a storm of indignation among employees. The heated debate can be on the anonymous online platform Blind track. “Is that supposed to scare people?” asks an employee. One accuses the company of violating data protection. Others comment that they were wrongly contacted. Amazon acknowledged, “There might be instances where we were wrong.” It would have “taken several steps” to ensure that the email “reached the right recipients”. One commenter described the email as “the supreme absurdity”.
Employees have until September 15 to decide
(Photo: Blind)
As the “New York Post” writes, citing the tech portal The Information, managers are said to have threatened individual employees that they will have to move to a central hub or have to leave the company. Allegedly, those affected have until September 15 to make a decision. According to FT, presence in the office has probably been tracked in recent weeks by scanning employee ID cards. An e-mail was received by those who had been on site less than three days in the past three to four weeks.
The Seattle-based group had officially prompted its employees on May 1stto return to the offices three days a week. At the end of the month, thousands of Amazon workers took to the streets in protest. In a petition they demanded: “Employees need a say in decisions that affect our lives.”
Amazon isn’t the only employer in the US now taking stricter measures to force the return to the office. In March, Apple threatened punitive measures against employees who are not in the office for the required number of days. Elon Musk is also not a fan of working from home: working from home is unfair and morally wrong, he said. Musk is demanding a return full-time.
“Shift to a whip mentality”
Google has also taken a tougher stance against the stubborn office aversion of many employees. The group made it clear that those who are not in the office three days a week risk having an impact on the performance appraisal. There were also threats against employees who resist at advertising agency Publicis and Citigroup. Video conferencing company Zoom told its employees just this week that those who live within a 50-mile radius of their offices must be present in person at least two days a week.
The search for an explanation for the escalation in the home office vs. office dispute is ongoing: “I think they’ve been trying the carrot for quite a while, but in a lot of ways it hasn’t worked and there’s now a shift towards a more stick-like approach mentality,” the FT quotes Neda Shemluck, Managing Director at Deloitte. At the same time, she warned: “Many employers forget that there is always a war for talent and employees have many more opportunities than they used to have.”
To avoid contagion during the pandemic, tech companies had mostly sent their employees home. Many learned to appreciate flexible working during this time. According to a Morning Consultstudy, quoted by the Guardian, three out of five tech workers today no longer want to return to the office full-time. But that should also mean that the majority of Amazon employees are likely to agree with what is being asked of them, namely “hybrid” working from the office and the home office. One problem, however, could be that in California’s Silicon Valley, many have also used the time in the home office as an opportunity to leave their expensive place of residence in order to move to cheaper areas. Returning to the office should therefore cause problems for some.