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Amazon has told its staff they will have to return to the office five days a week starting early next year, one of the strictest corporate measures against remote work that has become common since the pandemic.
“We have decided that we will return to being in the office as we did before Covid hit,” CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memorandum told employees on Monday. “We’ve found it easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are simpler and more effective.”
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that people could work remotely “It will be a two-day work week, and that will continue to be the case going forward,” Jassy said. He added that exceptions will be made for employees with a sick child, family emergencies or coding projects that require a more isolated environment.
Amazon It also said it will end hot-desking and return to assigned floor plans in its U.S. buildings, though the practice will continue in Europe. As of the end of 2023, the company had about 1.5 million full- and part-time employees, according to regulatory filings.
While the vast majority of them are hourly warehouse workers or delivery drivers, it still has hundreds of thousands of office-based employees.
Amazon has been at the forefront of the return-to-office push, making it an exception among tech companies that continue to offer more flexible conditions. Google requires staff to regularly attend one of its buildings three times a week, and many startups continue to work entirely remotely.
In May last year, Amazon introduced a three-day office attendance rule across the company and Aggressively guarded policy, monitoring when employees entered and exited buildings with their badges and warning those who persistently failed to comply.
“The advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote. “The past 15 months… have reinforced our conviction about the benefits.”
In Other sectors In the financial services sector, for example, five-day mandates have been put in place, but typically only for certain employees, such as traders and senior managers. Last year, JPMorgan Chase told its chief executives they should be on full-time duty to set an example for the rest of the company and help train young people.
Jassy, who has been at Amazon since 1997 and replaced founder Jeff Bezos as chief executive in mid-2021, also outlined a number of other initiatives aimed at boosting the e-commerce and cloud giant.
It has created a “bureaucracy mailbox” for staff to report “unnecessary and excessive processes or regulations.” [that] The CEO also announced a reduction in middle management staff with the goal of increasing the ratio of “individual contributors” to managers to 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of next year.
“As we’ve grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have over the past few years, it’s understandable that we’ve added a lot of managers,” he wrote. “Artifacts have been created that we’d like to change — for example, pre-meetings for pre-decision meetings, a longer queue of managers who feel they need to review an issue before moving forward.”