Baseball or Basketball?

This week Amazon shared an internal memo.

In it, they called time on their existing hybrid policy, and instead announced their decision to return to their pre-covid norm: that, by default, you’d be working from an office.

Unlike most internal emails, it’s made a bit of a splash.

The Times’ current headline is “Amazon demands workers return to office five days a week.” The Guardian’s? “Amazon demands workers return to office five days a week."

The way the memo’s been written up, and responded to by many, has been that Amazon are issuing a simple “return to office” edict., meaning that by January next year, you’ll be expected to be back in the office five days a week, or else.

There’s a problem. That’s not what the memo actually says.

Here’s the bit in question:

“To [be] better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID.”

It’s a tightly constructed sentence, and one that begs a question: what does working in the way we were before the pandemic look like?

Later on we get some help in figuring that out:

“Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.”

This is where I think the sleight of hand comes in.

If I work at Amazon in 2019 and my child is sick, or a pipe in my house has burst, fine, I’ll work from home.

If I’m with customers, well yes, I’m not going to be in the office, but to think of that as remote work, or as something that was an exception that needed to be policed, would have been nonsensical.

Speaking to customers was the work, and well, if they wanted me to come to them, that’s what building with customer-obsession was all about.

Finally, and most importantly, there’s the ability to absent yourself from the office whenever you wanted to do focussed, solo work.

What’s being said here is that, in Amazon in 2019, if I wanted to get my head down and focus on something, I could just ask my manager if it’s ok for me to not turn up to work for a few days.

In theory, that might have been the case. But in practice, I doubt many people were doing that.

This is the trick of the memo (and why it’s such a well-written one).

Instead of taking what office culture in 2019 was really like, and applying that, it’s taking an imagined, better version of office working, and telling its employees that it’d like them to work like that instead.

So what does the memo really say? Basically: by default you’ll do your work in the office, unless you’re speaking to customers, or doing focussed work that needs a quiet environment.

In practice, that doesn’t really mean five-days a week, every week in the office.

Why? Because quite a lot of the actual work that matters in any company (some would even say all) comes from speaking to customers, and then quietly going away and building what they want.

This isn’t really a return to 2019, but instead a shift to a default office policy: come to the office to work, but if you have a task that can better be done elsewhere, don’t.

Last week I wrote about the concept of precision workspaces - a way of thinking that prioritises choosing the right workspace for whatever task you’re doing at the time, rather than having a single workspace you lock yourself into throughout your working week.

This applies to companies, just as much as it does to people.

“NVIDIA is doing what all companies need to do in a world of precision workspaces: to figure out what types of work you value, and set expectations about time in each space accordingly. They have devolved this choice to the individual, but some companies might choose to set this at the company, or team, level. Once again, there is no one right answer.”

This is basically what Amazon is doing here.

They’ve just come to a decision that’s different to NVIDIA (who operate as a remote-first company), based on their own, very specific, business needs.

Because Amazon isn’t like most other companies: they’re the fourth largest employer in the world, with a business of staggering logistical complexity.

As a result, the biggest problem they have as a company right now - which they mention directly in the memo itself - is a lack of communication.

If this is your problem - one of competing fiefdoms and misaligned priorities - then strategically it makes sense to prioritise time spent in the office with others. In other words: meetings.

Because, in their view, what matters most for Amazon as a business right now, the thing they want employees to do the most, is spend time with other Amazonians.

But for the rest of us, where competing fiefdoms and misaligned priorities are problems that we can only dream of, it won’t necessarily be.

Karri Saarinen, co-founder of Linear, made this point in a interview last week with Bryce Roberts:

“Remote and in office, it’s a different kind of skill-set. You need a different type of team for it. You can’t just flip it back and forth when you want, you have to choose which sport you’re playing. You’ve built an in-office team, they’re playing baseball. And then if suddenly you say they have to play basketball. It’s not going to go well. The baseball players don't have the talents for basketball. The managers don’t know how to coach it.”

Where team members work isn’t an add-on: it’s a core design choice that shapes your entire company structure.

This is why it’s difficult to draw any broader lessons here, and probably an error to try and do so.

Because it’s not really a memo doing remote work down at all: it’s just them saying that for us, as a company, we don’t want to play the remote-first game.

It’ll come with some pretty heavy costs: it dramatically shrinks the distance employees will be able to live from an Amazon location, and will mean shedding a lot of good people.

But it’s a trade-off they're willing to make.

You might not. And instead want to look like Linear and NVIDIA instead.

What matters is that you figure out what game you’re playing.

Basketball, baseball, or another sport entirely?

aled@ashore.io

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Once a week I write about lessons in creativity from unexpected places. You can see the rest of what I write, and join 3.5k+ others by signing up to my weekly email - Crossover Creativity - here.