Amazon to Require Workers to Return to Office 5 Days a Week

Lauren Rosenblatt
The Seattle Times (TNS)

Amazon will require employees to work from the office five days a week, starting in January, the tech giant has announced.

It’s a shift from the current three-day-a-week return to office mandate, which Amazon has had in place since May 2023. In a note to employees Monday, CEO Andy Jassy wrote that the company is 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,” he continued.

“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.”

The expectation now “is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances,” like house emergencies or child care, Jassy continued.

The return to office mandate has been met with opposition from some workers since the company first announced the policy in February 2023, but Amazon says it has continued to see benefits from in-person collaboration over the last 15 months.

In Monday’s announcement, Jassy said Amazon was also going to reduce the number of managers in the company by early next year.

As Amazon has grown over the last several years, it added “a lot” of managers, Jassy continued, creating layers of bureaucracy that made it difficult for employees to move quickly and feel ownership of their product. It also filled up calendars with pre-meetings for pre-meetings and created a long line of people who had to sign off on decisions before they moved forward.

Amazon has now asked each organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.

“With a company of our size and complexity, the work won’t be trivial and it will test our collective ability to invent and simplify when it comes to how we organize and go after the meaningful opportunities we have across all our businesses,” Jassy wrote.

The decision comes after months of rolling layoffs, starting as far back as November 2022 and totaling more than 27,000 cuts companywide.

To further reduce unnecessary steps in workflow, Jassy said he had created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for employees to send in examples of processes that could be slimmed down.

As part of the new return-to-office mandate, Amazon also plans to bring back assigned desk arrangements, Jassy told employees.

The new mandate takes effect on January 2. Amazon’s Global Real Estate and Facilities team is still working on a plan to accommodate desks.

In his note to employees Monday, Jassy billed the changes as a way to strengthen Amazon’s culture, something he and other senior leaders have often invoked when discussing their reasons for mandating a return to office.

Over the last several months, Amazon’s executives had questioned if the company had the right structure in place to meet its ambitions around speed, innovation and connection to customers, Jassy continued.

“We think we can be better,” he said.

“Our culture is unique, and has been one of the most critical parts of our success in our first 29 years,” Jassy wrote. “But, keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time.”

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