Office politics
Remote work is back on the agenda, with Amazon and Tabcorp telling employees to come back to the office. But reversing the work-from-home trend might be tougher than it seems.
For what feels like the millionth time since we all staggered from our home offices after Covid, blinking at the sunlight, everyone is talking about finally severing the cord on working from home. This week, the instigators of the discourse are two companies rarely mentioned in the same breath: Amazon and Tabcorp.
Local media was eager to draw a link between their parallel moves to drag staff back to the office — a flattering comparison for the $970 million Tabcorp, which faces challenges of a markedly different scale than those the USD2 trillion ($2.9 trillion) tech giant is confronting.
But it’s worth teasing out. In both cases, the public rejection of the remote work dogma of the post-pandemic era serves a higher mission purpose than padding out numbers in a spreadsheet and appeasing CBD landlords.
It is notable that Amazon’s in-person work push came as part of a broader fusillade by CEO Andy Jassy against the excessive bureaucracy he believes the company has accumulated over the past few years. Under Jeff Bezos, Amazon pitched its corporate culture as an extension of its warehouse regime, only designed to output high-quality decision-making instead of pallets of deliverable goods.
