Amazon wants to reverse course. After four years of remote work, Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy said Monday that he wants all employees to return to the office five days a week.
To foster a culture of collaboration, “we have decided to return to the office as we did before the pandemic,” Jassy said in a note to employees posted on Amazon’s website. “As we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the benefits of being together in the office are significant.”
Jassy also said teams work best when people work together in person, while the company’s corporate culture is strengthened. The new mandate will go into effect on January 2, 2025.
In February 2023, Amazon asked all employees to return to the office for three mandatory days, which sparked some protests from workers.
Jassy acknowledged that before the pandemic, when full-time in-office work was the norm, there were exceptions to telework for employees who had extenuating circumstances. That leniency will continue.
“If you or your child were sick, if you had an emergency at home, if you were on the road to see clients or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people were working remotely,” he wrote in the note.
Some labor experts have said that companies’ elimination of remote work could lead to employee turnover, noting that since the pandemic, many employees have come to rely on the flexibility of working from home at least some of the time. On LinkedIn, economic historian Dror Poleg speculated that Amazon’s new policy is designed to incentivize some employees to leave the company.
“Companies use return-to-office measures when they want to reduce their workforce,” he said. “So the easiest way to lay off employees is to force them back into the office.”
Some Amazon employees appear dismayed by the call to return to the office, and have expressed their displeasure in an internal messaging channel, according to the New York Times. “The whole situation is very depressing and demotivating, to say the least,” one message read, according to the newspaper.
—The Associated Press contributed to this report.
