Amazon is aiming to revert its corporate operations to the pre-pandemic era. After four years of remote work for many employees, CEO Andrew Jassy announced on Monday that he expects all workers to return to the office full-time, five days a week.
To promote collaboration, Jassy stated in a memo posted on Amazon’s website, “We’ve decided to return to the office as we were before COVID began. Looking back over the past five years, we still believe that the benefits of being together in the office are substantial.”
Jassy emphasized that teams work more effectively when employees are physically together, which also strengthens the company’s corporate culture. The new in-office requirement will take effect on January 2, 2025.
In February 2023, Amazon initially required employees to come back to the office for three mandatory days per week, sparking some protests from staff.
Jassy acknowledged that, even before the pandemic, there were exceptions to full-time office attendance for employees facing extenuating circumstances. This flexibility will continue. “If you or your child were sick, if you had a household emergency, or if you needed to work in isolation to complete a project, employees worked remotely,” Jassy wrote in the memo.
However, some labor experts have warned that eliminating remote work could lead to increased employee turnover. Since the pandemic, many workers have come to rely on the flexibility of working from home at least part of the time. Economic historian Dror Poleg speculated on LinkedIn that Amazon’s new policy might be a strategic move to reduce its workforce. “Companies use return-to-office mandates when they want to cut headcount,” he remarked. “The easiest way to push employees out is to force them back to the office.”
Some Amazon employees expressed their dissatisfaction with the return-to-office order in an internal messaging channel, according to The New York Times. One message reportedly read, “The whole situation is just very depressing and de-motivating, to say the least.”
