According to the “Financial Times” (“FT”), the email containing the quoted request went to all employees who had not been in touch often enough in the past few weeks, namely “fewer than three in less than five of The past eight weeks are “days of the week” stamped on the employee’s ID card. After complaints from some employees, Amazon later admitted that “there may be cases where we were wrong,” according to the Financial Times, which, like other media, also expresses Data protection concerns.
In this context, the IT portal GeekWire invokes data from Amazon, according to which the anonymized data will only be passed on when an employee is swiped, “in order, for example, to get an overview of how many team members come into the office.” GeekWire also points out employees who have been mistakenly reprimanded for working from home too much. As the IT portal reports more with reference to internal information, the person concerned asked in an internal conversation whether one should use selfies to prove their presence in the office in the future.
Strong opposition from the workforce
Mandatory attendance at Amazon, which has been in effect again since May 1, was met with little approval from the workforce from the start. This is demonstrated by the internal Slack channel which appears to still be heavily used and launched for this reason alone. There was also a petition signed by about 30,000 Amazon employees and a strike in June.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced in February that he wanted to get his workforce back in the office. “Returning thousands of employees to our offices around the world is not easy. So we will give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan,” Jassy said in a broadcast at the time.
As for Amazon, it appears that it is not alone in tightening the measures that have been taken now. The Guardian reminds us of Apple, where there have been threats of punishment against employees who don’t want to return to the office part-time since March. As another example, the newspaper cites Twitter (X), where full-time work in the office was reintroduced shortly after Elon Musk took over.
Systematic and mixed approach
There is also a stricter measure at Google and Zoom. At Google, a three-day work week is now expected in the office. According to the Financial Times, the company suggested to the workforce that refusing to return to the office “could affect performance appraisals.”
Even video conferencing company Zoom, a major beneficiary of home offices, now wants to get its workforce back in the office. As a company spokesperson explained to Bloomberg, a “hybrid structured approach” is now being taken. This states that employees who live within an 80km radius of the office must now work there at least two days a week.
The majority are not interested in full-time office work
At the same time, surveys continue to indicate the high popularity and use of home offices, especially in the IT sector. The Guardian cites a Morning Consult study, according to which the majority (85 percent) of tech employees “now work in either a hybrid form or completely remote.” Three in five of those surveyed were also “not interested in returning to the office full time”.
