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Q

01

0:00/1:34

Amazon has built its $1.3 trillion empire largely by tracking and evaluating almost every aspect of a customer's life. From a new TV to a toilet-paper refill, Amazon knows what a customer wants and when they want it, and it's always ready to serve it to them.

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empire
기업 왕국, 거대 기업

This obsession with metrics and data, however, does not appear to extend to certain parts of Amazon's workplace. Over the past few months, the company has aggressively pushed employees back to the office.

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obsession
강박 상태, 집착
extend
연장하다, 확장하다

02

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In February, Amazon announced that employees would be required to come into the office three days a week and since then, the e-commerce giant has escalated its battle with remote employees: sending emails to employees about their attendance, creating internal dashboards to display how many days a week each employee was coming into the office, and telling managers in October that they could begin firing employees who weren't meeting the return-to-office requirements.

번역 보기
escalate
단계적으로 확대되다

When perturbed employees have pressed executives for the reason behind the mandate, supposedly data-obsessed higher-ups have seemed to have no data to justify it. Asked in August about this, Mike Hopkins, a senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, offered a vague response, saying that he had "no data either way" on whether mandating in-office work made people more productive but that executives believe Amazon's workers do their best work when they're together. 

번역 보기
perturbed
심리적으로 동요하는
mandate
지시, 명령, 권한
supposedly
추정상, 아마
higher-ups
상관, 상사

03

0:00/1:34

As the return-to-office battle has heated up in the past six months, there has been a marked increase in declarations that remote work is less productive. But diving deeper into this evidence reveals flawed logic — and a media industry obsessed with proving bosses right.

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declaration
선언, 공표
flawed
결함이 있는

The study that has most often been used to argue for the necessity of in-office work is a July working paper from researchers at the National Bureau of Economic Research, which randomly assigned data-entry workers at a company in India to work either from home or in the office for eight weeks.

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necessity
필요성
data-entry worker
데이터 입력 요원 (데이터 입력하는 단순한 업무 수행자를 일컫는 듯 합니다.)

04

0:00/1:34

The researchers determined that remote workers were 18% less productive than their in-person counterparts. Journalists have consistently cited this study without, it seems, taking a moment to consider its findings.

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in-person
직접, 몸소 (직접 출근한)
consistently
일관하여, 한결같이

First and foremost, it's farcical to use the work of entry-level data workers in India — who were recruited specifically for the study — as a proxy for all employees in all industries around the world. Secondly, the measurement of their productivity was "net speed," or the number of correct entries they made in a minute. The "drop in productivity" is really about how fast people could put numbers into a sheet — but that's not what most people do at work. 

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first and foremost
다른 무엇보다도 더
farcical
웃음거리가 된, 우스운
proxy
대리인, 대리

05

0:00/1:34

Despite the limited evidence against it, corporations are increasingly trying to kill remote work. Corporate statements about these decisions never seem to justify the shift beyond platitudes about "togetherness" and vague references to "culture." Look deeper, though, and they reveal the rotten core of the mandates.

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platitude
진부한 이야기
rotten
썩은, 부패한

Roblox, a company that derives its revenue from digital worlds, reversed its flexible work policy in October, telling employees that if they didn't work at least three days a week in the office they'd be laid off. The reason for the about-face? Based on its CEO David Baszucki's blog post announcing the move, it seems mostly about vibes.

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lay off
~를 정리 해고하다
about-face
뒤로 돌기, (주의, 태도 등의) 180도 전향