There are often gloved-hand moves being made by corporations, "adjustments" to their operating practices, that turn out to have other, sometimes unintended, most times carefully planned, outcomes.
Here's one such set of moves. TL;DR: Move back into the office or (unspecified) action will be taken. It presents a number of questions for me and I'm going to try and unravel them here.
COVID
COVID is a long way from being an "insignificant thing like flu" as we all seem to want to pretend. It's still churning along at rates worse than when we were in the lockdowns that prompted the WFH practices that companies now seem determined to destroy.
COVID itself
It's still just as infectious, just as damaging, as it was. And in fact with some of the new variants we're already skating balls to the wall close to losing the war against a virus. Putting people back in close proximity seems a move designed to kill off and incapacitate staff. You have to wonder how that mindset could have taken hold, no matter how much or little based on fake Kool-Aid it is.
Long COVID
The other reason COVID's not finished with us. LC is to have health ill effects from the ravages of COVID after the actual virus first stages have passed. A person may not be shedding virions any more but they also have little capacity to deal with daily commutes and dealing with in-person interactions. Again, it's got me speculating why a company would want to do this.
Work performance
It seems apparent that the world didn't disintegrate during the lockdowns, nor did workers forget their duty to their employers, because the work got done, often better than they had in offices. A few slackers perhaps, but they could be weeded out and in fact I seem to recall one of these cases being online along with the solution which was to terminate that person's employment and replace them.
So. Why?
Given the company's insistence on RTO (Return To Office) you have to agree that the company sees some advantages, some improvement to their bottom line. Corporations don't operate on a social, familial basis. They work towards financial goals, and those goals always include some increase in profit margins.
Forget the team-building "we work better as a face to face team" kumbaya bullshit. That's nothing they're concerned with. Employees have proven able to complete their tasks from home just as efficiently, so that's not the stated reason they can give, either.
Worker efficiencies
Having proven able to do their jobs under what the management might consider challenging conditions, they may be of the opinion that returning these "new improved" workers back under the corporate whip.
Worker actual work hours
Shorter work weeks / hours have not been proven to negatively affect actual work output. This has been shown in study after study now, and not just by paid-for research either. So if workers got their work done in fewer hours at home, then that means that the company may think that the employee will perform more tasks when placed in the office environment again, considering how they may have appeared to have a few spare "slack" hours during their WFH work time.
Real Estate Issues
Also, it might irk many corporations that they're paying rent on properties that aren't being utilised. And the part where Amazon is considering moving back to main hubs and ditching smaller offices seems to indicate that. But is it really?
Asking remote employees to face increased commute times over their original RTO commutes seems like a fairly bad idea and might result in employee attrition due to the ever-present "screw you!" response some workers will inevitably have at this. It will also result in further attrition as employees develop health conditions, and also as stated before, employees with LC suffer health declines or even fatalities.
Culture
The stated culture reasons ("It's easier to learn . . . our culture . . . in the office . . . true for people of all tenures at Amazon . . .") don't ever forget that your company is NOT your family. That idea of "culture" is "value extraction at any cost to the employee" not "fine fuzzy warm relationships between employees." I mean - there may be some slight benefits to the social cultural aspects of all clustering in soulless spaces but I really can't see that as a primary reason. And yet Jassey led with it...
Analysis Mr Spock
I'll start off: There's an elephant in the room. See if you can spot it. Meanwhile, the analysis:
We can say that "culture" is only desirable to the company insofar as it helps with onboarding. Jassey says onboarding is a culture goal. I say that it's the only reasonable goal to surmise. Maybe some employees get all warm and fuzzy at having colleagues around them to bother and distract, or maybe a very select few miss the distraction and bother. But these aren't productive. Also - going by their stated attitudes to RTO - most employees are signalling quite emphatically that they don't want or need "in-person social culture."
It almost looks like management are wanting to piss a few employees off enough that they'll quit.
Then there's the dubious benefits of commuting to work and back daily. For a start, we know that the daily commute spikes pollutant levels wherever there are commuters. We know how for a few glorious weeks, clean air and a reduction in greenhouse gases accompanied lockdowns. So forcing commuting makes little sense in this context.
There's the daily frustration of sitting in traffic / sitting on public transport for several hours every day. It removes those hours from your leisure and social life. (The most savvy will also see how when the Eight Hour Day was apportioned, it seems that only the Work Eight Hours has been preserved as unalterable and inviolate. Companies are quite happy for the employees to take the daily commute times out of their own leisure times, and don't give back half the daily travel time by way of shortening the work day...)
And then on top of that is the health effect - commutes generally happen from places with little pollution to an area with heavy pollution due to all the commutes converging there. In your own car you can shut out the pollution - but generate more for fellow commuters to have to shut out... As it's often a frustrating process, there are also health effects caused by increased stress levels.
I'm betting unhealthier employees aren't more productive than employees sitting at home where they're in effect cutting their commute to the three minutes it takes to close the laptop and step out of the home office.
Then there's that whole COVID angle. Are management really that hoodwinked because the figures aren't quite so loudly announced now? I don't think so, but I'd actually rather be wrong than to believe that COVID could be being used as a tool of attrition to reduce staff numbers. I just can't discount the possibility...
So - RTO will involve staff attrition, pretty certainly. And staff going back to their work practices from before WFH of using the water cooler and break room, informal cubicle meetings, and other counterproductive practices. It could involve some resignations due to stress, health, or anger at being forced.
Listen. When I was last in employment, if I'd brought a chair shiatsu massage insert to work for my current state of health, I'd have found myself fired pretty smartly. If I was in the state of physical health I'm currently in and had been asked to not bring the massager because of "morale" (which was the dark side of "culture back then) I think I'd have had no option but to resign.
As it is right now, I'm sitting writing this while my lower back's getting rendered a bit more pain-free. Can you spot the difference in my writing because of it? And I can tell you that if anything, I'm able to work faster because I can stretch sitting to 30 minutes at a time rather than 10-15.
As I developed COPD / emphysema back then too, commuting became extremely damaging to me back then and was one reason I asked to be on disability pension. And because I've since developed some of the long-term LC issues as well, any office space that involves stairs, high CO2 levels, or contact with people who have flus or colds is also out for me unless I want to die years earlier than I should.
I don't owe any company that much of my life additional to work time.
elephant!
The one thing that isn't in that article is AI. Need I paint the bigger picture NOW ?
But of course I will. Watch Amazon as they lay off those injurious to cultural morale, accept the reignations of the "eff you!" and "not on my watch" mob - and then don't replace any but the few that do jobs that can't be done by AI.
(Okay, okay. I *may* just have closed my eyes to take a power nap after the shiatsu back cushion finished. But in my defense, I'm also retired with disability and doing this for the enjoyment and the very small donations pool this brings in.)
But I am betting that this is a great motivator behind many RTO campaigns by many companies. The people who are sitting in their office complexes are the ones that drink the Kool-aid, keep their heads down, and are at their most productive in a mob situation. The rest will have been outsourced to one or other AI software.
These companies will gain because they can close satellite offices and stop paying rent, they may even be able to relinquish one floor of their core office buildings, pay fewer employess, and slip a shafting in under the radar. Where you going to go to now, Central Office Slave? Don't forget that in a few more weeks we'll have a smarter AI that we could then use to replace you. (And don't let's bullshit about it. As soon as we have an AI that can replace you, we'll find a reason to let you go. But at least this way you'll stay on our terms until then.)
And that's my entire analysis. Prepare for it now. Since we can't really force a company to keep us on the payroll while an AI is doing our job (although by rights they should) we can do the next best thing. Lobby your government to tax the companies the full nine yards, and use the windfall to pay you a small (but adequate to survive on) Universal Basic Income. With a UBI under your belt you may not be able to afford the latest EV but you'll be able to pick and choose between jobs you actually like and want to do rather than be getting shunted from pillar to post by that company.
Activate! Do things! Right now! Write to your local members of government, write to the relevant ministers of tax and human support and legal rights and remind them that unless they plan to round us all up with our own military and shoot us, we're the people that will get them re-elected next year. Write letters to the Editor and the local papers. Share the futter uck out of this article and articles like it.
Keep The Bastards Honest! And - git offa ma lawn!
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