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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy this week told all corporate staff they would be expected to be in the office full-time from January. He said the move would help the company “deliver the absolute best for customers and the business.”
“We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” Jassy said in a memo to staff.
Bock told Fortune that while flexible working policies are generally seen positively by employees, Amazon’s decision may be partly due to a lack of empirical evidence that working remotely has benefits.
“From a company perspective there is not clear, overwhelming evidence that this is good,” he said, adding that Jassy’s announcement was a “very clear call for productivity.”
Some Amazon employees have criticized the move, with workers taking to internal Slack channels to vent their spleens.
“Whatever happened to ‘Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer,” one employee wrote, while another described the policy as “just going backwards.”