Amazon Tightens Return-to-Office Policy. It’s No Longer Enough to Go to the Office for Coffee: You Have to Stay

Amazon has been pursuing a very aggressive return-to-office policy since the pandemic’s travel restrictions were lifted, forcing its employees to return to offices several days a week or find work elsewhere.

The company’s employees are reluctant to return to their offices to do work that they can do at home with fewer interruptions. These disagreements between employees and the company have led to discord among Amazon employees, but the company has recognized the deception and taken steps to prevent it.

The Coffee Badge Trick” Given Amazon managers’ inflexible stance on remote work, tracking employee IDs to see who regularly comes into the office, employees have begun to use the trick Coffee badge.

The trick involved going to the office, recording their attendance, having coffee with coworkers and seeing each other in the company hallways, and then immediately returning home to finish the workday remotely without any interruptions. According to the State Of Hybrid Work 2023 study by consulting firm Owl Labs, 58% of hybrid workers use the trick. Coffee badge.

Legal loophole in the hour limitThe tricky part about the “coffee signing” is that the company required its employees to be there at least three days a week, but did not specify how much time they had to spend there. This left a legal loophole in which employees met their weekly attendance obligations but did not complete their entire workday as the company expected.

Amazon has set time limits for supportAccording to the publication Business Insiderto avoid Coffee badgeAmazon has required various departments of the company to spend a certain amount of time in the office.

Several teams, including retail and cloud programming, received internal messages via Slack telling them to spend a minimum of six hours on each office visit.

First warnings to those who disobey. According to internal sources of North American media, the company will begin to directly talk to those people who showed up in its offices using the technology Coffee badge.

“Now that we’ve been here for more than a year, we’re starting to talk directly to employees who don’t regularly spend significant amounts of time in the office to ensure they understand the importance of spending quality time with their coworkers,” said Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokeswoman, in a statement to Business Insider.

“We’re going back to school”. The employees’ reaction was immediate, and they shared comments via the company’s internal Slack, accusing Amazon managers of micromanaging their work. According to one internal message accessed by digital media, an employee commented that employees would end up acting like teenagers, monitoring their every move, “if they are treated like high school students.”

Employees complain about Amazon’s lack of transparency and insist on returning to the office without offering any data on how it’s improving the company’s operations. “Remember when we were measured by the metrics that actually mattered?” an Amazon employee wrote in an internal Slack message.

Strengthening the return to the office. Amazon is not the only company that has tightened its return-to-office policies in recent months. Big tech companies like Dell, Zoom and Salesforce have redoubled their efforts to get their employees to fill their offices again.

The State Of Hybrid Work 2023 study finds that 94% of employees would be willing to return to offices, but 29% would expect a pay rise in return to offset the extra costs this entails.

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Image | Unsplash (Bernd Dittrich), Wikimedia Commons (Lisi Mezistrano Wolf)