Amazon kills remote working, tells workers to be in office 5 days a week

Amazon has told staff they must return to the office five days a week from the start of next year, one of the strictest corporate crackdowns on remote working that has become commonplace since the pandemic.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” chief executive Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees globally on Monday. “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.

“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 said. He added exceptions would be made for employees with a sick child, family emergencies, or coding projects that needed a more isolated environment.

Amazon said it would also end hot-desking and bring back assigned floor plans in its US buildings—although the practice will continue in Europe. At the end of 2023, the company had about 1.5 million full-time and part-time employees, according to regulatory filings.

While the vast majority of those are hourly warehouse workers or delivery drivers, it still has hundreds of thousands of office-based staff.

Amazon has been in the vanguard of the return to the office drive, making it an outlier among tech companies that continue to offer more flexible terms. Google requires staff to regularly attend one of its buildings three times a week, and many start-ups remain completely remote.

In May last year, Amazon introduced a company-wide three-day rule for office attendance and aggressively policed the policy, monitoring when employees badged in and out of buildings and warning those who persistently failed to comply.

“The advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy wrote. “The last 15 months... has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”

In other sectors such as financial services there have been five-day mandates, but typically only for certain staff, such as traders and senior managers. Last year, JPMorgan Chase told its managing directors they needed to be in full time to set an example for the rest of the company and help train juniors.

Jassy—who has been at Amazon since 1997 and replaced founder Jeff Bezos as chief in mid-2021—also outlined a number of other initiatives aimed at galvanizing the ecommerce and cloud giant.

He has set up a “bureaucracy mailbox” for staff to report “unnecessary and excessive process or rules [that] should be called out and extinguished.” The chief executive also announced a cull of middle management aimed at boosting the ratio of “individual contributors” to managers by 15 percent by the end of the first quarter next year.

“As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers,” he wrote. “It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change, eg pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward.”