As a former big-tech exec who’s now running a startup, Vijaye Raji understands Andy Jassy’s desire to have employees in the office five days a week as a general rule. Unlike the Amazon CEO, the Statsig founder and CEO has the advantage of never having gone with a hybrid work policy at the startup in the first place.
“Especially in a startup, where you’re trying to outcompete all the other smart people in the world, I feel if you can get any advantage in one way or the other, take it,” said Raji, who was a VP and head of Facebook’s Seattle engineering office before founding the feature management and experimentation startup in 2021.
Why isn’t three days in the office good enough? Here is Raji’s take.
- It can lead to the need for constant monitoring and policing of attendance, which deviates from the culture of autonomy and trust that many companies have built, especially in the tech industry.
- In practice, the hybrid model does not always result in high attendance rates, with the percentage of people showing up on the designated in-office days often being less than 100%.
- For startups and others focused on software development, the advantages of in-person work for collaboration and company culture outweigh the potential benefits of a hybrid approach.
“As far as I know, in our competitive landscape, we’re the only ones that are in-person,” Raji said this week when GeekWire got in touch to get his take on Amazon’s plan. “I believe it has definitely helped us in terms of moving fast, removing friction, making faster decisions, and actually removing a bunch of overhead.”
In much the same way, Jassy says he wants Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup,” with streamlined decision-making as a result of in-person collaboration, and fewer layers of bureaucracy.
However, Raji and his Statsig colleagues decided from the start to go with an in-person policy, which means they haven’t had to navigate the choppy waters of getting employees to give up remote or hybrid work. (We reported in March about Statsig’s approach as one of a few startups bringing employees into the office five days a week.)
“The hard part is, you have these one-way or two-way doors,” Raji said this week, using a phrase popularized by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos to help determine how much thought and planning to put into big and small decisions. “In a way, going hybrid or going remote has been a one-way door.”
At companies like Amazon, many employees have spent the past few years optimizing their lives around greater flexibility, including moving farther from work, which may have been manageable even with the company’s current expectation of working three days a week in the office.
Statsig, based in Bellevue, Wash., has 97 employees. The expectation has always been to be in the office five days a week, with applicants self-selecting based on that understanding. If the arrangement doesn’t work for a prospective hire, no hard feelings, the company says, it’s just not the right fit.
To be clear, there’s flexibility built into the system. If someone’s basement floods, or furniture is being delivered, etc., Statsig’s employees have the leeway to work from home or elsewhere to take care of personal issues. But the baseline expectation is to be in the office five days a week.
That’s how it will be at Amazon, too, when its new policy starts next year.
“Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week,” Jassy wrote in his memo. “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.”
However, in Raji’s experience, an in-office policy is not without trade-offs, especially when it comes to recruiting.
It requires holding the line when a prospective employee lives in another state and can’t or doesn’t want to move to the Seattle region. It can even be a problem when a recruit lives in another part of the region, he said, far enough away to make a daily commute untenable.
Only 3% of tech companies with 500 employees or less are full-time in the office, according to Flex Index.
But in many cases, Raji said, it might be more important for startups to work in-person by default, when they are beginning to form their culture. Larger companies typically have the advantage of a well-established culture that they can leverage to make hybrid or remote work more feasible.
But Jassy has clearly decided that the new policy is key for Amazon’s future.
“If companies do want to act like a startup,” Raji said, “it helps to remove that friction.”
https://ift.tt/9FeGj2U September 20, 2024 at 01:00PM GeekWire
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