Amazon orders staff back to the office five days a week from 2025
Amazon said yesterday that it will require employees to return to the office five days a week from 2 January next year.
“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,” Andy Jassy, the CEO, said in a note to employees.
The e-commerce giant’s previous office attendance requirement for its workers was three days a week. Amazon workers can claim “extenuating circumstances” or request exceptions from senior leadership, according to Jassy’s memo.
“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,” Jassy said. He cited improved collaboration and connection between teams as reasons for the new requirement,
as well as the ability to “strengthen our culture”.
As part of an organisational restructuring, Amazon is looking to reduce the number of managers in its organisation and boost the number of individual contributors by the end of the first quarter of 2025 to reduce bureaucracy.
Like other technology companies, Amazon grew rapidly at the start of the coronavirus pandemic and then laid off swaths of its staff.
“We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organised that way,” Jassy said.
Since Covid lockdowns first forced
workers to be at home, employers and employees have clashed over how many days must be spent in the office.
In May last year, employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters walked out over changes to the e-commerce giant’s climate policy, layoffs and a return-to-office mandate.
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward,” Jassy wrote. “Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances.”