Amazon and UK government at odds over working from home

These are two opposing views on where desk-bound employees can work most effectively.

Amazon is ordering employees to come to work five days a week as the government pushes for greater flexible working rights, including working from home.

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

But around the same time the company’s announcement hit the news, the UK government was linking flexibility to improved business performance and a more productive, loyal workforce.

Few people have an opinion on how effective working from home will be, but for the government there are wider considerations, for example how caring responsibilities will be affected.

But more than four years after the pandemic began, what does the evidence show about how we work most effectively — and is Amazon right to think that having employees in the office full-time will enable better collaboration?

Fellow tech giant Microsoft studied its employees during the pandemic, examining the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 US employees in the first six months of 2020. The findings were published in the journal Nature Human Behavior.

The survey found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, remote workers tended to collaborate more with their existing networks of colleagues and were less likely to build “bridges” between different networks.

Real-time communication also decreased: meetings that would have taken place in person were not always held online, and instead emails and instant messages were sent more frequently.

The authors suggested that this could make it harder to communicate and understand complex information.

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

A 2020 survey of 1,000 senior decision makers in organisations by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) found that around a third were suffering from “reduced interaction and cooperation between staff”.

However, over 40% of managers said they saw an increase in collaboration when employees were working from home.

It’s hard to argue against increased collaboration, but equally, it’s no guarantee of productivity.

In 2010, CTrip, China’s largest travel agency, tried something entirely new with its flight and hotel reservation staff.

Around 250 staff were identified as employees who could potentially work from home. These employees had to be established in the company and were provided with suitable working from home accommodations.

About half of that group started working from home, while the rest continued working from the office.

Stanford University researchers found that workers were 13% more productive when working from home, mainly because workers took fewer breaks and sick days, and because it was quieter, they were able to take more calls.

The researchers found that the decline in turnover was especially strong among non-managerial employees, women and those with long commutes.

But Chinese telecommuters did get some exposure to the office, spending one day a week with their colleagues, which may have provided some benefits: A few years later, another study by Stanford researchers suggested that fully remote work could result in a 10% drop in productivity compared with working in the office all the time.

They cited communication barriers, lack of guidance for staff, issues building workplace culture and difficulties with self-motivation.

Amazon is not the only company telling employees to return to the office full time.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon famously described working from home as an “extraordinary situation” – the US bank is requiring its staff to come into the office five days a week.

US rivals JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley also support employees returning to the office, while some European banks are taking a more flexible approach.

Elon Musk’s Tesla also requires employees to work from the office full time, which has led to reports of space issues.

Musk’s other company, SpaceX, has implemented a policy requiring employees to return to the office full-time.

But it wasn’t without impact: A study published earlier this year found that SpaceX lost 15% of its senior-level employees when it implemented the policy.

The pandemic has upended work routines that, in many cases, have been in place for decades.

Linda Noble, now 62 and originally from Barnsley, was used to wearing suits and make-up and in 2020 was a senior local authority official scrutinising the governance of the fire and police services.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit and she was working from home.

“I hated it. I missed the interaction of going to work and having someone smile at me,” she says.

But over time, Noble adapted, setting up an office at home and quickly finding she was twice as productive as before, even if that was partly down to an inability to switch off.

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

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

Perhaps unsurprisingly, not all studies have come to the same conclusions: Some suggest that working from home improves our physical health, while others refute this. The same can be said for our mental health.

Employee health was the main reason one UK company decided to bring staff back to the office as soon as possible after lockdown restrictions were lifted, said Francis Ashcroft, one of the company’s directors.

He was the chief executive of a large private child welfare company in the UK, and wanted to return to the office “to be part of a team” after “some employees were suffering from heightened anxiety”.

“We also recognise that 80 per cent of staff work directly in child care or education,” Ashcroft said, adding that from the perspective of fairness, “it is right for them to return.”

He claims that while team members were collaborating online 95% of the time before, “we’ve brought that back to the office, and that’s 5%.”

“It created a sense of reality and belonging,” Ashcroft said, adding, “There was much more teamwork in the office when it came to delivering services.”

Despite these experiences, a comprehensive review of telecommuting that looked at a range of other studies concluded that, overall, telecommuting makes workers more efficient.

The difference between the government’s and Amazon’s approaches essentially boils down to whether some employees should be allowed to work from home, which Amazon doesn’t believe should happen.

Gone are the days when Linda Noble worked exclusively from home. She is embarking on a hybrid career. She is drawn to the “balance” of working from home and in the office.

According to the CIPD, the benefits of hybrid working include “better work-life balance, improved focus with fewer distractions, more time to spend with family and friends, wellbeing activities, savings on commuting time and costs, and increased levels of motivation and engagement.”

And it may also reduce employee turnover: A study published this year found that Chinese companies that implemented hybrid working saw employee turnover fall by a third.

From an employee perspective, the optimal period for hybrid work is three days in the office, which is when employee engagement is highest, according to a Gallup survey of US workers, but it also notes that “one size does not fit all.”

In the UK, the number of people working exclusively from home is falling, but importantly, hybrid working continues to grow, accounting for 27% of the workforce.

Gallup said that despite much fanfare from companies trying to get employees back to the office, the underlying trend is that the future of office work will be hybrid.

This is in line with the UK government’s position, which is clear that it believes the possibility of working from home will increase productivity.

Amazon’s calculations show evidence of increased productivity among employees who work partly from home, but they don’t seem to capture the full details of how they do their jobs.

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