Amazon tracks and targets US staff over 3 days in office rule

[alex-nt]

This week I went to the office (not Amazon, another company in Europe) for 3 days in a row because we had new-joiners and I wanted to make it easier for them in the beginning. I live near the office, just a 15m walk away, and I would still not like to continue 3D/W. I know, people call it entitlement, but my problem is that the office is a hostile environment. Here is my experience, in an office that was at most 30% capacity, in a 3Y old building:

  - The "kitchen" area is so tiny, if you want water you will queue, there are only 2 places on the whole floor where you can get it and they are tiny rooms where at max 5 ppl could enter, 3 comfortably.

  - Queues at the bathroom, there are 2 stalls, for the whole floor, I couldn't find another one (I really hope there is one more, I just failed to find it, I did ask, nobody knew about another one). This got worse and worse as the week progressed. I've noticed a similar issue at my previous employer (5Y old building, part of why I left, health issues that are greatly improved by the access to a toilet)

  - They implemented some eco-friendly lights, with movement sensors. This sounds great and I am for helping the environment, the problem is that in practice these lights turn on-off every few minutes, during the day, in summer, in a sunlight filled building. My eyes were so tired every EOD.

  - In the same eco-friendly manner they made the AC not run during the night and morning. So, if you respected the work schedule and came to the office in the morning it was hotter than outside. It's summer, we had 30C in the morning, 47C in the afternoon. I needed to wait for 1-2h for the AC to kick in and recover after arriving in the office.

I am conflicted, I did see that the new-joiners liked the in-person meetings and all, and I do get it. It is easier for non-experienced people to talk to new colleagues online if they have some interactions before. But, time after time, as my employers change buildings I see always reductions in common areas/bathrooms/etc. I find it hilarious now that I have to research the building of potential employers and ask them if they plan to move out in the next 1-3Y (more and more jobs no longer offer remote work in my area).

[late2part]

A long long time ago, I initiated a project to move 80% of the SaaS company's workload out of a big cloud provider that is fond of 3 day in office work weeks into privately run data center cages. To be clear, we bought and ran the computers, rented the network and the cages/rooms in the data center buildings/campuses.

One of our grading criteria was how many bathroom stalls and urinals they had in the men's and women's bathrooms.

Some of these places had 200k sqft (20k m^2) and just 1 stall. No bueno!!!

When we were evaluatin the sites/locations (in the early days) we had to queue our 8 folks up for 5-20 min for bathroom breaks before we could go to lunch!

[housemusicfan]

Your chief complaints (eco friendly everything in new construction, AC restrictions) are likely due to compliance with local laws. I would suggest to choose wisely when electing your political leaders. In fact California has a requirement for half the cubicle outlets in new offices to be on timers that shut off during "non-working" hours.

[mrbonner]

Apparently you are not the pro in term of limited restrooms stall. You need to “floor jumping”: the art of using the stair either up or down a few levels until a free one is avail.

[spacemadness]

They could have just made the article focus on how the big corps are trying to anger staff enough to quit on their own so they don’t have to pay severance. These companies are playing with fire. It turns out you do need some staff to finish projects and the more chaos you cause, the less will get done with existing staff.

[rybosworld]

I'm very pro WFH but this is pretty benign and standard tbh. One of the reasons employers give you a badge in the first place is to track whose coming and going into the building.

Before the pandemic/WFH, another employee got let go at my company because they were trying to stealthily work remote. My understanding is that their badge-in/out data (or lack thereof) was used.

[fnordpiglet]

At a prior megacorp that I just quit from for their return to office strategy people would come into the office, swipe their badge at the entrance, log in to their machine, lock the screen, and go home to work.

[taeric]

A lot of places have badge in and out readers nowadays. Bolted in during pandemic to "help make sure we don't have too many people in the office for safety." Kept because of course it was kept.

[golemotron]

> Amazon has tracked the attendance of US-based workers and targeted those who appeared to fail to comply with its hybrid working policy, sparking concerns about privacy.

Concerns about privacy? Really? They expect that entering and leaving their employer's building should be something that they should be unaware of?

[francisofascii]

Sure. Most companies track entering/leaving but are not actively monitoring it, Employees become concerned when moving from tracking to actively monitoring.

[doitLP]

https://archive.is/gwuFp

[pimlottc]

The title reads less confusingly with some well-placed hyphens:

“Amazon tracks and targets US staff over 3-days-in-office rule”

[sapiogram]

What a bizarre article. How can an employer not be allowed to keep track of when you work?

[housemusicfan]

It reads like an Onion headline. "Gen Z learns their badges can be used to track their movements. Said one employee: 'This is not OK!'"

[_ea1k]

Yeah, that was oddly non-specific. How can being at the company's office ever be "private"?

[ClumsyPilot]

indeed this is location tracking, not productivity monitoring.

[jjulius]

>The email to a select number of employees prompted some to raise concerns about privacy...

This is a fascinating perspective for Amazon employees to take given the numerous privacy concerns many people have had about Amazon for a long time.

[jitl]

I have a friend who’s required to do 3 days in the AWS office, buuuut… Amazon hasn’t re-opened the building he’s supposed to report to. Like he has a desk assigned in a closed building.

[spacemadness]

Did they get the email?

[lopkeny12ko]

To summarize:

* Amazon requires in-office work N days a week.

* Employees agree.

* Employees don't honor the agreement.

* Amazon sends a notice that employees need to honor the agreement they made to return to office.

* Entitled employees are upset.

[schott12521]

- Amazon employees that were going into an office pre-pandemic switched to virtual when the company asked.

- Amazon employees stay productive, company makes the most it ever has due to the pandemic.

- Amazon fumbles for 1.5 years, doesn’t clearly communicate the desire to have everyone working in Seattle/hubs again, continues hiring remote talent.

- Most employees get frustrated at the fact that Amazon has complete control of the contract. Amazon says “you must work here” and there’s 0 room to negotiate.

Now I get it, we’re US workers with little workers rights and we get paid good money. So, to people like you, we should suck it up and just deal with it! Quit being so entitled!

Sure.

Where’s the empathy for our fellow humans that are being forced to move across the country with their family because they took a job that promised them one thing, and is now taking that away?

[hiyer]

Well, they didn't make up the rule just for kicks. It was bound to be enforced eventually, and that's what they're doing now.

[glimshe]

I'm a huge WFH fan, but I don't see the problem of a company demanding 3+ or even daily attendance. It's a bad business decision IMHO, but it's simply that: a business decision. And they have the right to know if you are complying with that job requirement, it's not too different from requiring warehouse workers to lift boxes.

[nine_zeros]

I think employees should also have a law in their favor stating that once they badge out of office at 5 pm, their laptop is locked completely.

This will make all attendance reasonable.

[someonehere]

With all the talk of more Covid coming this winter, should be interesting to see how that plays out with lockdowns again if they happen.

[yellow_lead]

Just let your coworker/friend swipe in for you. If they can't tell otherwise, does it really matter?

*Not financial advice

[x86x87]

Lol. Based on chats with a buddy that [still] work there, in [most] a lot of buildings they have a system sort of like the subway. Swipe, door open, you pass through, door close. There isba sensor that can tell if you went in. You also swipe in and out of the building. So not only they know you were there, they know for how long.

From a business security point of view this makes sense. You want to know who is in the building at all times.

Also, from conversation with same person: everyone got the email. Not a single soul they talked to met the "quota". Isn't it great? Now they're gonna move to the fire everyone stage?

[kornhole]

This might work at some companies only using badging, but remember Amazon owns Ring, facial recognition technologies, and probably has location tracking on company phone apps. Someone else badging you would probably create more problems for him and you.

[ilyt]

"Concerns about privacy" on just "works at office/remotely" is a weird complaint.

I'd think even under EU and GDPR logging whether user badged in or used VPN would be entirely fine.

[Abroszka]

No, it's not fine. It adds a lot of complications and EU countries are different. It's not an accident that this is US only. The main problem is that while it's fine to collect that data, but to use it to calculate attendance is an another question.

[jauntywundrkind]

I've heard a lot of orgs have flex weeks or flex days. I really want more awareness of who is doing what in this regard.

My org is giving folk 6 flex weeks a year where they can work remote all week.

[1-6]

It's the end of WFH Hybrid for certain industries.

[ojhughes]

Many (most?) London based roles are hybrid now , train occupancy seems back to pre-covid levels

[catchnear4321]

again? already?

[Eumenes]

This is going to spawn a plethora of linkedin influencer and biz insider articles about "psychological safety" and "hostile communication" and HR consultants will get paid to use chatgpt to make language sound less bad

[squalo]

Bezos is desperate to hold on to those corporate tax incentives.

[nunez]

Jassy's running the show now though.