Amazon asks employees to come to office five days a week

Amazon is ending its hybrid work policy and ordering employees to come to the office five days a week.

Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said the change will come into effect in January. Memo to employees,

“We have decided that we will return to the office as we were before COVID hit,” he said, adding that this will help employees be “better equipped to invent, collaborate and connect with each other adequately.”

Mr Jassy has long been considered a skeptic of remote work, but Amazon employees were previously allowed to work from home two days a week.

Amazon's efforts to bring corporate workers back to the office have been a source of tension within the company, which employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide in full-time and part-time roles.

Employees protested at the company's Seattle headquarters last year as the company tightened full remote work allowances implemented during the pandemic.

Amazon then fired the protest organizer, sparking allegations of unfair retaliation, a dispute that was raised with labor authorities.

In his message on Monday, Mr Jassy said he was concerned that Amazon – which has long prided itself on retaining the intensity of a start-up while moving on to become a tech giant – was seeing its corporate culture weakened 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 “bureaucratic mailbox” for employees to complain about unnecessary rules and that the company was asking managers to restructure so managers could oversee more people.

Amazon said these changes could lead to job cuts

In addition to returning to the office five days a week, Amazon said it would also roll out hot-desking in the US.

The company said employees can work from home in unusual circumstances, such as a sick child or an emergency at home, as was the case before the pandemic.

But unless they are exempt, Mr Jassy said: “Our expectation is that people will attend the office except in exceptional circumstances.”

Remote work was at its peak during the pandemic. Many companies started calling back employees in 2022, but the return remained incomplete.

As of this summer, about 12% of full-time workers in the U.S. were fully remote and another 27% reported implementing hybrid work policies, according to a monthly survey conducted by economists José María Barrero, Nicholas Bloom and Steven J. Davis.

Bank chiefs such as JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon are among the most high-profile individuals critical of remote work and may demand a full-time office presence.

But the attitude has spread to other industries, and this year UPS and Dell have brought their workers back to the office full time.

In his memo, Mr. Jassy said Amazon’s experience adopting a hybrid policy “reinforced our belief about the benefits” of working in person.

But Bloom, the Stanford professor, said he doesn’t think these announcements signal a widespread change in work policies, saying his data showed time spent in the office has remained fairly stable for more than a year.

“While every high-profile company is scrapping work-from-home policies, there are others that are extending them – but they're not being discussed in the media,” he said.