Dell’s chief operating officer Jeff Clark sent an internal email to employees this week asking those who live within an hour’s drive of Dell’s main office to work in the office at least three out of five days a week, in contrast to a three-year-old promise by a company executive that most employees would always telecommute, according to The Register. The contrast is stark.

We want more people to work in a hybrid mode,” Clark wrote in an internal email. Those who live within an hour’s drive of the Dell office should come to the office at least three days a week. We’re still flexible — you can talk to your leader and work out a schedule that works best for you and the business within that framework.”

Clark also said he understands that employees will need time to adjust to being back in the office and that this is the beginning of a clearly defined hybrid work model at Dell. He expects those employees who are close to the office to be able to arrange their schedules as soon as possible.

This policy contradicts the comments made by Dell’s CEO Michael Dell on LinkedIn last year. At the time, Michael Dell criticized some corporate executives who complained that remote work was affecting teamwork and corporate culture, telling them “you’re doing it wrong. He also said that recalling employees to the office would not solve these problems.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy (Andy Jassy) announced on Feb. 17 that starting in May, the company would return to its pre-epidemic office model, with most office workers coming to the office at least three times a week.

Amazon employees expressed dissatisfaction with the decision. They formed a group on Slack, a corporate instant messaging software, to promote the advantages of telecommuting and express their concerns about the new policy. At the same time, they drafted a petition calling on Amazon to reconsider the policy.

Today, 29,200 workers, or about 10 percent of Amazon’s corporate workforce, have signed the petition, opposing the return-to-office policy. This suggests that Amazon is being slightly hasty in forcing employees back into the office after three years of telecommuting due to the epidemic.

In the petition, Amazon employees listed some internal data, as well as comments from employees about the policy, to support the continuation of telecommuting.

For example, a survey last year showed that 87 percent of Amazon employees prefer to work in the office “one or two days a week, or less. They believe that telecommuting beats office work in many ways, including “ability to focus,” “productivity,” and “innovation/creativity.

Employees also say that telecommuting facilitates a better work-life balance, saves them commuting time, gives them time to care for their children, and contributes to climate change.

Some employees said they would have to start looking for new jobs because of Amazon’s new policy. Other employees said that the company always asks us to show evidence to support some ideas at work, and now the company should also look at the data from employees (the number of people who signed against it).

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Source Amazon.com

Part of Jassy’s blog post is as follows.

"It's not easy to ask all of our employees to return to the office, but we have plans in place to move forward with this.

This new adjustment is bound to have its shortcomings, but we hope to steadily advance the office experience over the next few months (or years) as we continue to make adjustments to move toward our intended goals."

Jassy believes the change is being driven by the need to develop an Amazon culture where ideas and creativity can be more easily shared and stimulated in a face-to-face setting.

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