Working From Home

My LinkedIn feeds seem to be dominated by news from Amazon that they are making their employees return to work. Needless to say, the employees are not too happy about it. There are theories about how Amazon is going to use the new policy to get rid of surplus employees. Normally a company would layoff those that are not needed. With this new policy they will be able to fire them without severance benefits, saving themselves significant money.

As you can imagine, I think this policy is disappointing. I think that one thing we all learned from COVID-19 is that not everyone is required to be in the office to get work done. It is proven that some people are even more productive working from home as there are not as many distractions at home as there are in the office. I recognize this is not true for everyone.

Fortunately the company I work for is embracing the work-from-home concept. Sony recently sent out an e-mail to a large group of employees talking about how only spending 2 or 3 days in the office has become the new way of working. The e-mail then goes on discussing changes the company is making to reflect this new normal. It is encouraging to me to know that my company is keeping up with new work trends and not trying to enforce policies that make things miserable for everyone.

While there are a lot of employees that thrive working from home, there are also those employees that become less productive. My wife worked with someone that only got about 80% of her work done because of not being in the office. Unfortunately she insisted on traveling around the United States in a recreational vehicle (RV) and so having her come into the office could not be an option. The business owner opted to replace her with someone that now completes 100% of the work assigned. Doing it in the office is not a requirement.

Amazon may lose a lot of quality employees with their new policy. It would be better for them to take a more personalized approach and only require those that need to be in the office to return. Unfortunately that is much more difficult to implement than the blanket policy they have unveiled. I'm glad I didn't take that job at Amazon now.