Amazon is ordering staff back to the office five days a week as it ends its hybrid work policy.
The change will come into force from January, Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff.
”To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. I’ve previously explained these benefits (February 2023 post), but in summary, we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another. If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.
Mr Jassy has long been known as sceptic of remote work, but Amazon staff were previously allowed to work from home two days a week.
Amazon’s push to get corporate staff back into the office has been a source of tension within the firm which employs more than 1.5 million people globally in full-time and part-time roles.
Staff at its Seattle headquarters staged a protest last year as the company tightened the full remote work allowance that was put in place during the pandemic.
Amazon subsequently fired the organiser of the protest, prompting claims of unfair retaliation, a dispute that has been taken up with labour officials.
In his message on Monday, Mr Jassy said he was worried that Amazon – which has long prided itself on preserving the intensity of a start-up while growing to become a tech giant – was seeing its corporate culture diluted by flexible work and too many bureaucratic layers.
Mr Jassy, who replaced founder Jeff Bezos as chief executive in 2021, said he had created a “bureaucracy mailbox” for staff to make complaints about unnecessary rules and the company was asking managers to reorganize so that managers are overseeing more people.
Amazon said those changes could lead to job cuts.
In addition to returning to the office five days a week, Amazon said it would end hot-desking in the US, although it will continue in most of Europe.
The company said staff could still work from home in unusual circumstances, such as a sick child or house emergency, as was the case before the pandemic.
But unless they have been granted an exemption, Mr Jassy said: “Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances.”
