Amazon has become the latest tech giant to enforce a more rigid approach to staff attendance at its offices.
Last week, Google and Zoom adopted more prescriptive policies over hybrid working, signalling the growing dominance of the belief that in-person collaboration brings improved results.
Now, in the US, Amazon has sent emails to staff urging them to attend the office and has been tracking the attendance of workers, targeting those seen to be failing to comply with its hybrid working policy.
An email, seen by the Financial Times, was sent by Amazon to some employees this week saying they were “not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week”.
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The email added: “We expect you to start coming into the office three or more days a week now.” Some recipients said they had received the email in error and Amazon has admitted “there may be instances where we have it wrong”.
Amazon said the email had been sent to employees who had “badged in” fewer than three days a week for five or more of the past eight weeks or who had not badged in three days a week for three or more of the past four weeks.
Staff at Google are now expected to be in the office three days a week, and the company has told workers that attendance may affect performance reviews, in an effort to crack down on the worst offenders who have resisted returning to the office.
Video conferencing company Zoom told employees this week that employees living within 50 miles of one of its offices had to attend in person at least two days a week.
Global marketing and advertising group Publicis has warned its US staff that failure to comply with its three-days-a-week policy could have implications for their pay and chances of promotion, telling them by email: “Failure to meet the three day/week in-office expectation post Labor Day may impact performance outcomes, including salary increases, bonus payouts and/or promotion opportunities.”
According to Bloomberg, Citigroup has warned it will “hold colleagues accountable” if they do not comply with the bank’s policies on office attendance.
Neda Shemluck, a managing director at Deloitte, said there was a danger in this new approach. He said: “A lot of employers are forgetting there is always a war for talent and employees have a lot more options than they had.”
Leslie Tarnacki, chief HR officer at WorkForce Software, agreed that there were risks for the big tech firms in adopting a more hardline policy.
She told Personnel Today: “If businesses wish to retain staff, improving flexibility is vital. While flexible working is enjoyed by most office-based workers, those who work in shift-based roles often miss out on this benefit due to the complexities of their job. This level of flexibility for frontline staff, as well as those in HQ, will be a competitive differentiator in today’s war for talent.”
Nick Bloom, a Stanford economics professor who studies workplace data, said office occupancy remained “pancake flat”, adding: “For every company that is calling people back in, there have to be others that are doing the reverse,” he said.
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