Amazon and UK government at odds over home working

There are two competing views on where office workers work best.

Amazon has ordered its staff to return to the office five days a week, as the government seeks to boost flexible working rights – including working from home.

The tech giant says employees will be able to “invent, collaborate and communicate” better.

But once the company’s announcement became news, the UK government was linking flexibility to improved performance and a more productive and loyal workforce.

There are not many people who lack an opinion about how effective working from home is, and for the government there are wider considerations such as how caring responsibilities will be affected, for example.

But more than four years into the pandemic, what does the evidence tell us about how we work best, and is Amazon right to believe that having people in the office full-time will allow them to collaborate better?

Tech giant Microsoft conducted a study of its employees during the pandemic, looking at the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 employees in the United States during the first six months of 2020. The results were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The study found that remote workers during COVID-19 tended to collaborate more with the networks of colleagues they already had, and built fewer “bridges” between different networks.

There was also a decline in real-time communication – meetings that would have taken place in real life were no longer necessarily held online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.

The authors noted that this may make it difficult to convey and understand complex information.

Microsoft’s study was data-driven. But what about the human experience?

CIPD survey 2020 A survey of 1,000 senior decision makers in organizations found that about a third of them suffer from “low employee engagement and collaboration.”

However, more than 40% of managers said collaboration was greater when people were working from home.

It’s hard to argue against more collaboration, but at the same time it doesn’t guarantee productivity.

In 2010, China’s largest travel agency, CTrip, tried something very new among the employees in the airline and hotel booking department.

Approximately 250 employees were identified as potential home workers – they needed to be established in the company and have a suitable home working system in place.

About half of this group started working from home, while the other group stayed in the office.

Researchers at Stanford University found that workers were 13% more productive when they worked from home. – This is mainly because workers had fewer breaks and sick days, and were able to take more calls because the place was quieter.

There was a particularly large drop in turnover among non-managerial employees, women and people who travel long distances to work, the researchers said.

But these Chinese home workers were seeing some of the work in the office: They spent one day a week among their colleagues. And that may have been helpful to some extent—a separate study by Stanford University researchers years later suggested that fully remote work could lead to a 10% drop in productivity compared to being in the office all the time.

Barriers to communication, lack of guidance and mentoring for employees, problems with building a work culture, and difficulties with self-motivation were all mentioned.

Amazon isn’t the only company asking its employees to return to the office full time.

In a famous statement, Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon described working from home as an “aberration.” The American company requires bankers to be in the office five days a week.

Rival US banks JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley have also backed workers returning to offices, while some banks in Europe have taken a softer approach.

Elon Musk’s Tesla also requires employees to be in the office full time, leading to reports of problems finding space for them.

Another of Elon Musk’s companies, SpaceX, has also introduced a policy requiring workers to return to the office full time.

But it wasn’t without consequences: When the policy was implemented, SpaceX lost 15% of its top-level employees, According to a study published earlier this year.

The pandemic has upended work routines that in many cases were decades old.

Linda Noble, now 62, from Barnsley, was used to wearing a suit and make-up. In 2020, she was a senior officer in local government, overseeing governance in the fire service and police service.

Then Covid hit and she started working from home.

“I hated it. I missed the connection — when I go to work, there’s someone who makes you smile,” she says.

But over time, Ms. Noble adapted. She set up her own home office, and she believes she was soon twice as productive as she was before—if only partly because she couldn’t stop working.

Many people with disabilities also believe that working from home makes them more productive.

Study conducted in 2023 A survey of 400 people found that workers with disabilities felt they had more independence and control when working from home, which led them to better manage their health and wellbeing, and 85% felt more productive.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all studies come to the same conclusions. Some studies suggest that working from home improves physical health, while others disagree. The same is true for mental health.

The health and safety of employees was one of the main reasons a UK company wanted to bring them back to the office as soon as possible after lockdown restrictions ended, according to one of its directors, Frances Ashcroft.

He was CEO of a large private childcare company in the UK. “Some people were getting increasingly anxious,” he says, and wanted to get back into the office “to be part of a team.”

Mr Ashcroft said there was “also a recognition that 80% of staff were at the frontline”, working in person in children’s homes and education, and so it was “right to return” for reasons of justice.

Although team members were collaborating online at 95% of what they were before, “going back to the office added that 5%,” he says.

“It brought a sense of reality and belonging,” Mr. Ashcroft says, adding that “teamwork was much better in the office when it came to service delivery.”

Despite this experience, umbrella review Another study that looked at a range of other studies concluded that working from home, in general, increases the amount of work that workers can accomplish.

The difference in approach between the government and Amazon essentially boils down to whether or not working from home should be part of the mix, with Amazon believing it should not be.

Linda Noble’s time as a home-based worker is over. She’s about to start a hybrid career. She’s drawn to the “balance” of working from home and working in the office.

According to the Chartered Institute of Human Development, the benefits of hybrid working include “a better work-life balance, greater ability to focus with fewer distractions, more time for family, friends and healthy activities, savings on commuting time and costs, and higher levels of motivation and engagement.”

This may be enough to reduce employee turnover. A study published this year A study found that a Chinese company that adopted hybrid work succeeded in reducing employee turnover by a third.

From an employee’s perspective, the optimal time for hybrid work is three days in the office – this makes employees more engaged, according to Gallup Poll of workers in the United States, although she also says that “there is no one size fits all.”

In the UK, the number of people working exclusively from home is falling. But more importantly, hybrid working continues to rise, reaching 27% of the working population.

Despite widely publicized moves by companies to bring employees back to the office, the underlying trend is that the future of office work will be hybrid, Gallup says.

This is in line with the position of the British government, which clearly believes that the ability to work from home increases productivity.

Amazon’s calculations seem to suggest that the available evidence of increased productivity among employees who work part-time from home is not sufficient to capture the details of how they work.

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