Mike Hopkins, the senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, said at an internal meeting recently about Amazon’s mandate forcing employees to work in the office rather than from home: “It’s working…. I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
He added that it’s the “personal belief” of Amazon CEO Andy Jassy that in the office is where employees do their best work.
Jassy shares that belief with other tech CEOs, including Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as business leaders across the spectrum of industries.
Hopkins’ claim reveals what’s really behind back-to-office mandates: irrationality — specifically, favoring “belief” over data.
Hopkins says he doesn’t have data, but he does. Unfortunately for him, the data doesn’t agree with his “belief.”
We live in an age in which people flaunt data when it agrees with their view point, but do something else when the data disagrees. (And this is as true in business as it is in politics.) Here’s what people do when facts contradict what they want to belief:
They say “it’s complicated.” (When data agrees, it’s simple. When data disagrees, it’s complicated.)
They make up “alternative facts” that support their position. (We see this every day in all kinds of public discourse.)
Or, as Hopkins does, they deny the opposing facts exist. (Only the facts that support my beliefs exist.)
Hopkins’ cop-out is especially disappointing because Amazon is a famously data-centric, data-driven company.
Let’s look at the data
A tech.co survey found that slightly less than half (47%) of companies experienced higher productivity by remote employees.
One-third (32%) of hiring managers say productivity has increased since remote work policies were implemented and 22.5% found that it decreased, according to an Upwork survey.
Prodoscore data says that productivity depends on the employee and how they’re managed, not whether they’re working from home or in an office. If they’re productive in the office, they’ll be productive working from home, according to the firm’s evaluation of 105 million data points.
More importantly, remote and hybrid work improved factors beyond productivity. Two studies by Owl Labs found that remote and hybrid employees were 22% happier than workers in an onsite office environment — and stayed in their jobs longer.
Other research, including from Ergotron, found that remote work improved employees’ physical and mental health and bolstered their job satisfaction.
Early in the pandemic, data emerged showing decreases in productivity for WFH employees. More recently, the reason for that became clear.
Stanford Economics Professor Nick Bloom aggregates mountains of data on remote and hybrid work, as well as return-to-office mandates; he concludes that hybrid work provides small improvements in productivity, whereas full-remote work is…
2024-01-15 03:00:04
Original from www.computerworld.com rnrn