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Amazon managers should not need face time for supervision
- The company should reconsider its effort to force office attendance
Amazon.com Inc has gotten serious about its return-to-office policy, according to Business Insider, encouraging managers to confront and even fire employees who don’t come in at least three days every week.
This puts middle managers at Amazon, long known for its “churn and burn” approach to managing its workforce, in an impossible position. Sack people who aren’t coming in—but who might be doing a very good job from home and could be difficult to replace—or risk their own futures if they do not boost attendance rates. Amazon is making a mistake with this approach. If there’s anything the last three years have shown us, it’s that we need not have eyes on each other to do good work. Although attendance at US offices hasn’t meaningfully increased over the past year, tension has, with a recent Gartner survey finding that most leaders are seeing “increased inter-team conflict” resulting from return to work mandates.
There’s still broad disagreement about whether remote workers are as productive. The workers themselves say yes: 86% claim they’re equally or more productive at home, compared with only 14% who said they were less productive, according to a recent survey led by Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom.
Many human resource managers and senior leaders see it differently. In a recent survey conducted by McKinsey and LeanIn.org, 83% of remote employees said Work From Home (WFH) made them more efficient and productive; but just 52% of HR leaders agreed. The bottom-line is that many senior leaders believe employees perform better in person—even if those employees don’t realize it.
Academic research isn’t going to tell us who’s right and who’s wrong; the raft of studies that have looked at the question of remote productivity in recent years have come to different conclusions. If I had to sum up the body of scholarly evidence, it would be thus: “Your mileage may vary.”
Most people know how they work best, says David Burkus, author of Best Team Ever: The Surprising Science of High-Performing Teams. On balance, when employees are given some control over where and how to work, their performance tends to improve. The people who prefer to work from home are more productive at home, and the people who prefer the office generally perform better in an office. Seen that way, there’s little reason to force employees to adopt a working arrangement they are resisting.
“I don’t view return to office as a dilemma about what the right percentage of time in the office is,” says Burkus. “It’s a dilemma about employees’ newfound taste of autonomy, and the need to keep them accountable to performance and connected to the rest of the team.” Managers can find ways to do that without relying so heavily on face time.
Yes, of course, it’s possible that some employees are underperforming at home—and are unaware of that fact, says Amy Gallo, author of Getting Along: How to Work with Anyone (Even Difficult People). With so many options now, she says, “It makes sense for all of us to be evaluating, ‘Is this how I work best?” I would even go a step further: I think workers have a responsibility to ask that question.
But anyone underperforming at home and blissfully unaware of it is probably in the minority, the experts said. And what’s more, simply bringing them back to the office won’t fix what ails them.
“Underperformance does not get handled just because a manager is looking at you,” says Liz Kislik, a management consultant and executive coach. “The manager needs to know what to do with you.”
Companies like Amazon should stop obsessing over return-to-office and focus instead on return-to-managing. Regular one-on-ones with employees, weekly team meetings where staff share updates, systems for tracking employee output—none of these requires adjacent cubicles. Yet at too many companies, there seems to be an assumption that they can’t start managing until they get those office attendance rates back up.
“Managers still do not, by and large, properly know how to supervise employees who are not right there under their noses,” says Dorie Clark, author of The Long Game: How to Be a Long-Term Thinker in a Short-Term World. “People use location as a crutch.” But whether you’re remote or in person, projects don’t supervise themselves.
The last few years have been rough on middle managers—and it’s not like it was an easy job before the pandemic.
Amazon’s approach will only make their jobs harder. And it will do nothing to convince employees that they are more productive in office. ©bloomberg
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First Published:24 Oct 2023, 07:58 PM IST
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