Amazon workers in the US are being tracked and penalized for failing to work from offices frequently enough, an email sent to employees this week revealed, as seen by The Financial Times.
"We are reaching out as you are not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week, even though your assigned building is ready,” the email message said, according to screenshots from corporate message board Blind.
Insider quoted an angry employee who asked on a Slack channel: "Is this supposed to scare people?", referring to the fact that Amazon could be tracking individual office-attendance records and not via office badges alone. One person, as seen by Insider, asked whether they should click selfies to prove they were in the office.
The Guardian reported that a follow-up email from Amazon stated that the message "intended to be sent to workers who have come into the office fewer than three days a week for five or more of the past eight weeks." Some workers reportedly also received the email by mistake.
Threatening workers to return to office "stands only to strengthen the growing labour movement in the tech space", rights activists said, as quoted by The Guardian. “Across its business lines, Amazon imposes a rigid and punitive system of management in an attempt to control and silence workers,” Ryan Gerety, director of the Athena Coalition, told The Guardian.
In May, hundreds of corporate Amazon workers upset about the company’s environmental impact, recent layoffs and a return-to-office mandate had protested at its Seattle headquarters.
Earlier this week, it was reported that Zoom, the company whose name became synonymous with remote work is joining the growing return-to-office 'trend'.
Zoom is asking employees who live within a 50-mile radius of its offices to work onsite two days a week, a company spokesperson told the Associated Press.
The statement said the company has decided on "a structured hybrid approach – meaning employees that live near an office need to be onsite two days a week to interact with their teams."
A Zoom worker on Blind alleged that Eric Yuan, the chief executive, said that if workers were unhappy happy with the policy change they could exit the company, as reported by SFGate.
Similarly to Zoom, many companies are asking their employees to show up to the office only part-time, as hybrid work shapes up to be a lasting legacy of the pandemic.
Google and Salesforce are among major companies that have also stepped up their return-to-office policies despite a backlash from some employees.
In June, The company updated its hybrid work policy Wednesday and it includes tracking office badge attendance, confronting workers who aren’t coming in when they’re supposed to and including the attendance in employees’ performance reviews, CNBC reported that Google expects most workers to show up to physical offices at least thrice a week, and was tracking office badge attendance, and including that in performance reviews. The report quoted Google’s chief people officer, Fiona Cicconi, who told employees in an email that new fully remote work will only be granted “by exception only.”
In March it was reported that Apple was issuing warnings if workers did not come in three times a week and that it was tracking employee attendance via badge records.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk had sent a 2.30 am email to employees saying "Office is not optional", in March.
A BBC article quoted a January 2023 survey by recruitment agency Monster which found that half of the employers believe giving employees hybrid/flexible schedules has been effective while a third who planned to adopt a hybrid model have changed their minds now.
(With additional inputs from AP)