Amazon’s new five-days-a-week return to office policy is “a triumph of traditional management over innovative management,” a former top Google executive says.
Laszlo Bock told Fortune that by mandating full-time office attendance for office-based employees, Amazon is returning to familiarity instead of favoring innovation.
Bock led Google’s people operations for a decade between 2006 and 2016 and is a cofounder of AI data firm Gretel. He compared Amazon’s reversion to its pre-pandemic office policies to ordering a new dish in a restaurant before reverting back to your usual order.
Bock used the example of ordering a chicken sandwich in a restaurant where you’ve previously only ever ordered a hamburger. If the chicken sandwich is good but not amazing and “no better than the hamburger,” the natural inclination is to revert to type, he said.
“You default back to what you’re comfortable with,” Bock told Fortune. “Why would you ever have the chicken sandwich again?”
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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy this week told all corporate staff they would be expected to be in the office full-time from January. He said the move would help the company “deliver the absolute best for customers and the business.”
“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in a memo to staff.
Bock told Fortune that while flexible working policies are generally seen positively by employees, Amazon’s decision may be partly due to a lack of empirical evidence that working remotely has benefits.
“From a company perspective there is not clear, overwhelming evidence that this is good,” he said, adding that Jassy’s announcement was a “very clear call for productivity.”
Some Amazon employees have criticized the move, with workers taking to internal Slack channels to vent their spleens.
“Whatever happened to ‘Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer,” one employee wrote, while another described the policy as “just going backwards.”