Amazon is blocking promotions of employees who don’t comply with its return-to-office policy, leaked documents show::Amazon has updated its promotions policy to enforce its office attendance policy.
I kind of don’t get what’s going on here. I’d think your options would be:
a) Go back to the office, or
b) Stop working there
Like you’d either say to your boss “Look, this work from home thing is really important to me, so I need to look for an opportunity where I can continue to do that,” or your boss would say to you “Look, you keep not showing up to work, so we’re gonna let you go.”
It seems like any period where the company says “Okay, everybody back to the office” and some people say “Oh yeah I’m just gonna ignore that” has got to be pretty short-lived, right?
The whole reason that it works is because the company can’t afford to lose everyone who’s not complying.
But promotion blocking seems like a weak move. If returning to office is enough of a workplace issue to be a deal breaker, threatening people with not taking extra responsibilities or challenges seems like a losing proposition. They’re already willing to lose their job over the issue, and you’ve shown that you can’t lose them, so now you’re gonna make it shittier to remain at the company?
And even besides the perspective that promotions are a benefit, many roles are in place for the company’s sake, to stay organised, are they now gonna not fill those? Or only fill them with external applicants?
Or is the idea to only promote the compliant ones? That would make some sense, at least.
I work at AWS (won’t after this Friday since I got a remote job), and while I’m pretty low on the totem pole, internally it is very clear what is going on. Leadership is slowly phasing out non-proximate workers. Why? No one knows really, but our best guess is unofficial layoffs and upholding commercial real estate.
It started with RTO 3 days a week for everyone except remote employees in May. Then in September basically all remote employees were forced to relocate to their team hub. This was as much of a shit show as you think. You were given 30 days to decide and 60 days to move. What people did was “decide” on the last day to move, and then drag their feet for the next 60. Then quit without notice as soon as they had another job lined up. Don’t get me wrong the market is rough, but 90 days is enough to find a job if you have halfway decent connections and AWS on your resume. By now my team already lost half of our devs (3/6).
More recently, in waves, they’re forcing people to relocate to team hubs. Even teams who were historically spread out across the US. I’m from the west coast but my team is in Colorado and the second I caught wind of this I grinded my ass off and got another job. When I told my manager he was very understanding but frustrated at the situation. My two teammates were even more frustrated, and one of them is on the west coast too. My team could be one person soon.
Didn’t mean for this to turn into a rant, but Amazon is nuking teams left and right like this and it will catch up to them. As a whole things are breaking more often in AWS systems than usual, and our service is starting to show cracks. Our reliability is down hard because we had a collective 35 years of knowledge leave our org. Almost all of whom were the team expert.
Yeah, Amazon has a pretty long track record of burning through employees at all levels. From the outside it looks like it’s very much to their detriment, but I guess they feel differently since they still do it.
Sorry it’s happening to you though. Hope you find a less sociopathic employer!
Ohh, so for many employees, it’s not “return to office” at all-- It’s a euphemism for “start going to the office,” which you didn’t have to do before, because your position was remote? That’s actually much worse, wow-- Especially if you’d have to relocate.
Or I guess maybe it’s more like they expect you not to relocate, through the “unofficial layoffs” lens.
That really sucks. I guess it also has some explanatory power for why they are taking these odd half-measures and tolerating non-compliance-- There are people who don’t even live near an office.
Really sorry that’s happening. I hope you find a company that keeps its promises.
Yup! That’s the bullshit part and what really grinds my gears when people say we’re just whining. I have 0 problem going to an office that I was assigned at my date of hire. What I have a problem with is 1) retroactively assigning offices to remote designated employees and 2) forcibly relocating people across the country for zero reason. They’re actively uprooting entire families and fucking so many people over.
I’m fortunate enough to have gotten another job before it impacted me thanks to referrals from friends, but not everyone is as fortunate.
Yes, that is 100% weapons-grade bullshit. Hopefully as a result of all of this, people start insisting on having their remote status written into their contracts, with steep penalties for breaches. Fool me once, shame on you, etc.
Congrats on the new job. I hope things go better for you from now on. At least that AWS experience will provide some nice career capital to make up for your poor treatment.
Thank you! I’m already getting some great use out of it as my new company hired me largely because of my AWS experience. I also learned a ton there thanks to my exceptionally brilliant team so I can’t say I regret my time there even if it was stressful.
Loyalty and obedience prized over competence once again
The policy is as much aimed at pragmatic people managers as it is as actual staff. Your boss might be fully aware that they would struggle to replace you and will be quite happy with you working from home and so cuts an off books deal as this stops your manager from suffering reduced output for their team while they struggle to replace you.
I have personally been in this situation for the last two decades, I have worked from home pretty much full time across multiple, separate companies. One place I worked post lock down even used the staff who didn’t mind being the office to improve the team average to benefit those who did.
A company wide policy like this will make it hard for the manager to cut such a deal, particularly if Amazon get petty over checking IP addresses and swipe card usage.
I think this is very likely, though it’s also prolonging this whole exercise by avoiding the dramatic conclusion and spreading the pain out over a longer time.
If every manager at Amazon woke up tomorrow and said “screw it, we’re enforcing this policy”, that would result in a mass firing event of quality talent, and Amazon would feel the pain of their policy decisions and either have to swallow that and try to move on or beat a hasty retreat and call this whole thing off. It would be a quick and decisive end to this whole debate, but instead we have month after month of employees stressed and angry while looking rebellious and unmanageable, managers stressed and frustrated while looking ineffective, and the senior leadership frustrated and looking impotent.
Someone’s going to win this fight eventually, but everyone trying to find middle ground and skirt the policy just takes what would be one big fight and turns it into many months of slow unease and turmoil that’s bad for everyone. I want the remote people to win this, but sometimes the way to win is the lose on purpose. Let the dog catch the car so he can realize what an idiot he was being.
Completely agree, although I think cheap removal of expensive staff is one of the main goals here. Amazon don’t value the majority of staff, not just the ones involved with the warehouses and home delivery so valuing the output of those in positions that can be work at home isn’t really in their nature. This is of course extremely short sighted of them but they will not change until they are forced to.
its no different when IBM, HP, etc. targeted older workers to be replaced by the then younger and much cheaper millennials who lacked the institutional knowledge and still got undercut by the Indians. Its almost always about the cash.
Some middle managers will actually be ok with WFH and have great people working with them. I guess it’s about those scenarios where the management is actually shielding the employees from a stupid policy.
Yeah. I know that it won’t be a popular opinion here, but I side with Amazon on this one. If it’s policy, it’s policy. You work for Amazon. They didn’t turn evil yesterday. Don’t like the bedbugs then get out of the bed. It’s the same with any job. If you don’t have any other options, then it sucks, but you are stuck with Amazon. Do the job or don’t, but don’t balk at the news that there are repercussions for your lack of actions.
Amazing how okay people are with a dictator when they’re called a CEO rather than a politician.
Just give up your whole livelihood, or be forced to move across the country, it’s okay guys it’s policy. Unreal.
Then by all means, go out and change that policy. Go on, I’ll wait… … … … Done yet? No? That’s because there isn’t shit you can do about it. Find a corner to pout in. We let this monster out of the box when we started consuming everything in sight. Don’t hop up on that high horse and act like you have no guilt in our current situation. We all do. We all made the choice to let these monsters do their thing the moment we bought that last thing we didn’t really need from the company with the shitty policies. So, please, shove your misplaced self-righteousness back into that rose colored crate and come live in the real world, where we all understand that things have gone to shit, and we all are culpable, and then try to change it, instead of playing online like you are somehow above the rest of us.
One day you’re hopefully going to learn that just because a company can do x or y does not mean that they should or that it is in their best interests to do so.
Companies will do X and Y until their employees and/or consumers say otherwise. If the employees don’t like this, then they’ll quit, or negotiate better terms. If consumers don’t like it, then they can just not buy from Amazon. Are you doing your part? We act like we don’t all reward this bad behavior all the time. Every time we buy something from Amazon, every time we show up to work at Amazon, we feed that monkey a treat. We can’t expect that monkey to change it’s behavior just because we don’t like it. Monkey like banana. Monkey gonna keep eating them every time we feed it one.
The problem os that they rely on their employees… go figure… this just means they cant afford to fire these people.
Some day I want to understand why this topic is so difficult especially for American companies.
They have to somehow justify their insane commercial real estate expenditures. Empty office buildings are a bad look.
It’s not that it’s a bad look it’s that all of their rich ceo buddies are getting robbed over shit downtown real estate. The companies with central offices support those real estate and they are seeing the value drop off the face of the earth. It’s all about their bottom line. It’s why we saw Biden throw them a bone by saying they’ll pay to covert them to cheap housing.
Any CEO who pushes such policies for the whole company is obviously 1) bored, needs a pay cut 2) sucks at their job.
- sucks at their job.
still needs a pay cut
- they hate the environment with a fiery passion
I didn’t think promotions are contractually obligated usually. As in you’re not guaranteed a promotion and it’s not written into your contract. So if Amazon, or any other company, wants to change the expectations for a promotion then as long as it is clearly communicated and given time to be adopted I don’t see a problem if they want people to work on site. Especially if working from home is, also, not part of your contract.
You don’t have to work for Amazon if you disagree. Find a, much better, job elsewhere.
I appreciate your use of the, often abused, parenthetical comma.
Thanks?
You’re welcome?
😜
That’s the idea. It’s illegal for Amazon to fire people for not wanting to return on-site, so they do the legally allowed minimum to condition promotions based on that. Legal, but still shitty. They hired a ton of remote (by contract) workers during the pandemic and made a shit ton of profit, now they don’t know how to get rid of them without a severance package.
It depends what’s in their contract. I honestly don’t know. I’m guessing based on zero experience of working in Amazon and am using my knowledge of European employment as a baseline. Of course, your mileage may vary in the US?
In the US, there is rarely, if ever, a contract. Unless you can show that you were let go for a legally protected cause (your age, race, religion, gender, and some other things), employers can fire you without any reason at all.
The only caveat here is the differentiation between for cause and without cause, as it impacts your ability to collect unemployment insurance payments. Employers pay those insurance premiums to the government and they are based on how often people let go from that company claim the insurance payments, so a company that lets go of a lot of employees is going to pay more than one that manages to find a way to fire them for cause or get them to quit.
This is my stance as well. You don’t lose your job, but why would I promote an employee who disregards policy. You’re not being asked to round up Jews. This isn’t some evil, “just following orders” moment.
Keep your job, but don’t expect to advance in a company who’s requests you decline. It’s far too entitled to think a person deserve a raise for telling your boss no.
It’s almost part of your KPIs, spend too long at a certain level and your manager will push you to work towards getting promoted.
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This article is very specifically talking about coercive exclusion which is illegal in the UK under employment law. Maybe in other countries too.
Wait, is it? Can you cite that? I have a friend who recently moved to the UK and had their promo blocked under this rule.
Coersive Exclusion usually falls under the Equalities Act in the UK and against one of the protected criteria in the act but Nationwide Building Society recently lost a court case against them regarding forced office attendance. I don’t remember the specifics but it may he worth reading up on.
I will add, I’m no legal expert. My advice would be for your friend to speak to Citizens Advice Bureau or a solicitor to see whether they have a case.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Amazon told its managers last month that employees slated for promotions must comply with the company’s return-to-office policy, which requires them to be in the office at least three times a week.
“If your role is expected to work from the office 3+ days a week and you are not in compliance, your manager will be made aware and VP approval will be required.”
In an email to Insider, Amazon’s spokesperson said compliance with the company’s return-to-office policy was one of the many factors it considers before an employee is promoted.
Last month, Amazon told managers that they now have discretion to fire employees who refuse to comply with the return-to-office policy, as Insider previously reported.
Those employees have argued that some of them were hired as fully remote workers during the pandemic and that they see the mandate as a shift from the previous guidelines that allowed individual managers to determine how their teams worked.
By September, Amazon was sharing individual attendance records on employees, a shift from the previous policy of tracking only anonymized data.
The original article contains 724 words, the summary contains 177 words. Saved 76%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
And? What did they expect?
If your company wants you in person go. Or quit. Not a hard concept.
Or strike. If you and your coworkers feel that your employer has expectations that are unreasonable or sufficiently understandable you have the right to organize and negotiate as a unified force.
Well, not like anybody is getting promoted at my company either…?
How is that relevant?
