Amazon Asks Employees To Return To Office 5 Days A Week

(RTTNews) - Online retail giant Amazon.com Inc. is asking its employees to return to office five days a week, starting January 2025, according to CEO Andy Jassy.

In a statement, which was also shared with Amazon employees, he presented a couple of changes to further strengthen the company's culture and teams.

Amid the ongoing spread of coronavirus in 2020, Amazon as well as majority of tech companies across the world had allowed their employees to extend work from home option at least until the crisis gets over.

In 2021, Amazon had allowed its corporate and tech employees to work in office for three days a week and an option to work two days remotely.

Jassy now said, ".. we've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID."

The CEO, who announced the benefits of being together in the office in a February 2023 post, now noted that the company continues to believe the advantages of being together in the office are significant while looking back at the last five years.

The expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances or if they already have a Remote Work Exception approved through s-team leader.

Amazon plans to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way, including the U.S. headquarters locations of Puget Sound and Arlington. For locations that had agile desk arrangements before the pandemic, including much of Europe, the company will continue to operate that way.

According to him, Amazon wants to operate like the world's largest startup, with a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency, high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration, and a shared commitment to each other.

For this, the company requires the right organizational structure to drive the level of desired ownership and speed; as well as set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business.

He further said that the company is asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today, he added.

Regarding its operations, Jassy, who has been with the company for 27 years, noted that Stores, AWS, and Advertising continue to grow on very large bases, Prime Video continues to expand, and new investment areas like GenAI, Kuiper, Healthcare, and several others are evolving nicely.

At the same time, the company is growing and inventing, and is also continuing to make progress on its cost structure and operating margins.

Jassy concluded, "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 of our businesses."