Amazon Workers ‘Appalled’ by How Execs Made Return-to-Office Decision

When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced in September that the company’s employees would be required to return to the office to work five days a week, he said executives had “observed” that staff culture and efficiency was better when employees were in the same place.

In a recent letter to a top executive, more than 500 Amazon employees said that they don’t want to upend their lives based on vague C-suite observations. They want data.

“We were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a five-day in-office mandate,” the employees wrote to Amazon Web Service CEO Matt Garman after a meeting about the policy change. The letter was obtained and first reported by Reuters.

For the last 16 months, Amazon has allowed most of its office employees to work from home two days a week. But, without offering any hard evidence, Jassy said people “learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” better in person.

While Amazon may have internal data backing up those claims that it’s decided not to share with its angry employees, academic studies have often found that hybrid work environments are ideal setups for both employees and corporate bottom lines.

A study published this year by economists at Stanford and several Chinese universities, examining 1,600 employees at a technology firm, found that those who were allowed to work from home two days a week had higher job satisfaction and significantly lower attrition rates than those who had to go to an office five days a week. The study also found no evidence that working from home affected employees’ performance reviews or the likelihood that they would get promoted.

An earlier analysis of corporate stock performances, by a University of Melbourne professor, found that allowing employees to work-from-home can be beneficial to a company’s stock value. The study concluded that work-from-home arrangements “are positively associated with shareholder returns” and that “the adoption of these working arrangements likely delivers material efficiency gains for US corporations, rather than resulting in moral hazards concerns.”

The recent Amazon employee letter to Garman came after a meeting in which the executive reportedly told employees that if they don’t like the new policy, they can quit. Reuters reported that he claimed—to significant skepticism from the employees who signed the letter—that 90 percent of employees he talked to were happy with the return-to-office policy.

By contrast, an anonymous survey of Amazon employees conducted by a professional networking company found that 91 percent of employees are dissatisfied with the new policy.