Amazon and UK government at odds over working from home – who is right?

They are two competing views on where desk-based employees work best.

Amazon is ordering its staff back to the office five days a week, just as the government is pushing for rights to flexible working – including working from home – to be strengthened.

The tech giant says employees will be able to better “invent, collaborate, and be connected”.

But just as the firm’s announcement became news, the UK government was linking flexibility to better performance and a more productive, loyal workforce.

Few are short of an opinion on how effective working from home is and for a government there are broader considerations such as how, for example, caring responsibilities are affected.

But more than four years since the start of the pandemic, what does the evidence tell us about how we work best and is Amazon right to believe people being in the office full time will allow them to collaborate better?

Amazon’s fellow tech giant Microsoft studied its employees during the pandemic. It looked at the emails, calendars, instant messages and calls of 61,000 of its employees in the US during the first six months of 2020. The findings were published in Nature Human Behaviour., external

The study indicated that, during Covid, remote workers tended to collaborate more with networks of colleagues they already had, and that they built fewer “bridges” between different networks.

There was also a drop in communication that happened in real time – meetings that would have happened in real life weren’t necessarily happening online. Instead, more emails and instant messages were sent.

The authors suggested this may make it harder to convey and understand complex information.