Amazon ends up working for office workers from home

Amazon is ordering workers to return to the office five days a week as it ends its hybrid working policy.

The change will take effect from January, said Amazon CEO Andy Jassy memo to employees.

“We have decided that we will go back to being in the office the way we were before the start of Covid”, adding that it will help employees to be “better equipped to innovate, collaborate and connect.” enough for each other”.

Mr Jassy has long been known to be skeptical of remote work, but Amazon employees were allowed to work from home two days a week.

Amazon’s push to bring workers back to the office has been a source of controversy at the company, which employs more than 1.5 million people worldwide in full-time and part-time roles.

Workers at its Seattle headquarters staged a protest last year as the company tightened a full telecommuting allowance that was put in place during the violence.

Amazon then fired the organizer of the protest, leading to claims of unfair retaliation, a dispute that has been raised with labor officials.

In his message on Monday, Mr Jassy said he was concerned that Amazon – which has long prided itself on maintaining the resilience of a startup while growing into a tech giant – is seeing its corporate culture diluted by flexible work and more management. layers.

Mr Jassy, ​​who will succeed founder Jeff Bezos as chief executive in 2021, said he had created a “bureaucracy mailbox” for employees to complain about unnecessary rules and the company is asking management to restructure so that managers look after more people.

Amazon said those changes could lead to job cuts

In addition to returning to the office five days a week, Amazon said it will be hot-desking in the US.

The company said that employees can still work from home in unusual situations, such as a sick child or domestic emergencies, as was the case before the pandemic.

But without them being released, Mr Jassy said: “What we expect is that people will be in the office without excusing circumstances”.

Remote working increased during the pandemic. Many companies began to recall workers in 2022, but the return was not complete.

As of this summer, about 12% of full-time workers in the US were completely remote and another 27% reported having mixed work policies, according to a monthly survey by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J Davis.

Bank executives such as JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon have been among the most vocal figures to criticize remote work and are likely to call for full-time office presence.

But the attitude has spread to other industries, with UPS and Dell reminding workers to return to the office full time this year.

In his written statement, Mr Jassy said Amazon’s experience with moving to a hybrid policy had “reinforced our belief in the benefits” of working in person.

But Prof Bloom, a professor at Stanford, said he did not think the announcements were a sign of a wider shift in workplace policies, saying his data had found that time spent in the office had been stable for more than a year.

“For every high-profile company that cancels work at home, there are others that seem to be expanding – they just don’t get media coverage,” he said.