- According to a memo from CEO Andy Jassy, Amazon will require employees at the company to be in the office “most of the time,” or at least three days a week.
- Until now, Amazon has left it up to individual managers to decide how often their teams need to be in the office.
- The new policy will come into effect on May 1st.
The Amazon headquarters stands virtually empty in downtown Seattle, Washington on March 10, 2020. In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon recommended that all employees in its Seattle office work from home, leaving much of downtown almost deserted.
John Moore | Getty Images
Amazon instructs the company’s employees to spend at least three days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo on Friday.
This marks a departure from Amazon’s previous policy, which left it up to individual managers to decide how often their employees have to work from the office.
Jassy said he and the S-Team, a tight-knit group of executives from nearly every division of Amazon, decided at a meeting earlier this week that employees “should be in the office most of the time (at least three days) per week.” ).” They made the decision after realizing it would benefit company culture and employees’ ability to learn from one another and work together.
Amazon plans to implement the change on May 1st. There will be some exceptions to the rule, Jassy said, such as B. Customer support roles that have the ability to work remotely.
“It’s not easy bringing many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re giving the teams that need to do this work some time to come up with a plan,” Jassy said. “We know it won’t be perfect initially, but the office experience will steadily improve over the months (and years) to come as our real estate and facilities teams smooth the wrinkles and ultimately evolve the way we want our offices to evolve set up to capture the new ways of working that we want.”
Other companies have recently called their employees back to the office either full-time or several days a week as the Covid-19 pandemic has eased. Google and Apple have been requiring some of their employees to return to the office since last year, while Disney began requiring hybrid employees to be in the office four days a week in January.
Amazon is pushing for its employees to be in the office more as the company goes through a period of tightening amid declining sales and a deteriorating economic outlook. Amazon initiated the largest layoffs in its history, affecting about 18,000 people, as well as a hiring freeze for companies. It also scrapped some experimental projects.
Jassy said one of the benefits of being back in the office is that employees have more opportunities to brainstorm and innovate.
“A lesser-known fact is that some of the best inventions had their breakthrough moments when people stayed behind in a meeting and worked through ideas on a whiteboard, or walked back to an office together on the way back from the meeting, or just with someone else later in the day Dropping by a teammate’s office for thoughts,” he added.
REGARD: Amazon’s layoffs are nothing more than a throwback to where it’s been over the past year