Amazon warns workers to come back into the office::This week, a reminder email was sent to employees who didn’t work on-site at least three times a week.
Amazon warns workers to come back into the office::This week, a reminder email was sent to employees who didn’t work on-site at least three times a week.
I know people who work in IT at places they have installed surveillance on wfh machines and the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.
I’ve been wfh with optional in-office work for over a decade and I know it can be done well. But I know there are a lot of people that you have to stay on top of who would be fine in an office.
So I don’t think these companies are going back into the office for no reason.
That said, I think this will backfire because the best employees will find work at places where they can work remote unless compensated far better than they can get at remote shops.
A lot of the complaints about people “being lazy” while working from home comes from managers that don’t know how to deal with WFH.
Management and team leads don’t need to unduly spy on people or micromanage them. They need to figure out a reasonable measure of productivity and track it, i.e. “What did an employee get done today/this week/etc?” The employees would probably be happy to help figure it out if it means they don’t have to come back in to the office.
From there, basic management skills apply. If it looks like someone is slacking off verify that’s actually the case, then go from there.
Agreed. And that’s why a lot of smaller companies will stick with remote work. But you can also get your productivity back by just calling everyone back into the office, and these big companies already have all the resources they need to do it. So they are.
It’s a good thing it’s impossible to goof off at the office!
No one said it wasn’t. I said they have evidence that people don’t work as much when they work from home.
Care to show that evidence?
I think there’s some critical information they’re missing. They need to establish a control group by using that same surveillance software for in office employees. And it’s pretty easy to tell when people are inattentive from home, but not as much when they’re in the office. You still need to find a way quantify that data though. Otherwise it really isn’t a fair comparison.
They did use it during wfh and after work from home. So it didn’t inform their decisions to call people back, but it did validate it.
Ah the old “let’s measure our workers”, I’m a programmer and I have seen them all or at least a whole bunch of stupid ways to try to measure our “effectiveness”. None that works.
Spoiler alert: hitting away on a keyboard for 9h straight per day is not productive.
So what does work? You can set up sprints with what seams like reasonable amounts of work and engineers will still miss their target occasionally. Sometimes weeks in a row. And sometimes for very good reasons. It’s a lot easier to gauge if someone is actually working when you can actually see them and give them the benefit of the doubt.
But even if your only metric is how much people are banging away on a keyboard, then you would have to be being purposely obtuse to not be suspicious when a company working from home does way less than they do in the office and they get significantly more story points complete in the office than they did working from home.
One thing that works is having faith in the people working and being a good leader. Treating people like numbers in a spreadsheet never does.
The slacker will slack everywhere he’s just a good excuse, everyone else will be most productive depending on what they like and need, and that is obviously not the same for everyone so the whole thing about everybody has to be in the office for productivity is so BS and backwards.