Amazon will require employees to work from the office five days a week starting next year — a move applauded Monday by business groups in the Puget Sound region and criticized by some of the company’s white-collar workers.
CEO Andy Jassy said in a note to employees Monday that Amazon will return to its pre-pandemic working conditions starting on Jan. 2. The Seattle-based tech giant will also reduce the number of managers and roll back other remote work flexibility, like allowing employees to work from anywhere for a limited number of weeks.
In-person work fosters collaboration, innovation and Amazon’s sense of culture, Jassy said, reiterating many of the reasons for Amazon’s decision to first require workers to come back to the office in May 2023.
The new policy is a shift from Amazon’s current three-day-a-week mandate. The changes mean Amazon will have one of the strictest return to office policies among Seattle’s tech giants, though some companies have been ramping up in-person requirements recently.
“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy said. “The last 15 months we’ve been back in the office…has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”
The expectation going forward “is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances,” like house emergencies or child care, Jassy continued.
The new requirement takes effect next year, but Amazon is already encouraging employees to spend more time in the office immediately, according to an FAQ document sent to employees Monday and viewed by The Seattle Times.
Workers have opposed the return to office mandate since the policy’s introduction in February 2023. Hoping to convince the company to loosen the requirements, workers signed petitions and participated in a walkout early on. But, Amazon maintained its policy and is now stepping up the requirement.
There was talk on Monday about planning the next walkout or other actions to protest the mandate, according to an Amazon Web Services employee based in Virginia who asked to remain anonymous to protect their job.
The news blindsided workers, the employee said, based on conversations they had with coworkers and internal communications shared on the messaging service Slack. So did the original return to office mandate, the employee continued, but workers then hoped they would be able to use their collective voice to alter upper management’s opinion.
That didn’t work last time, so this time around, workers are starting to say it might be time for them to leave, the employee said.
A five-day a week mandate is “so unsustainable for so many people,” they said. “This time, people much more quickly jumped to ‘we’ve exhausted all our options’…This is a final straw kind of situation.”
While workers were nervous about what the mandate would mean for them, businesses around Amazon’s headquarters welcomed the news. Jon Scholes, president and CEO of the Downtown Seattle Association, said the three-day-a-week return already helped businesses in the Denny Triangle and South Lake Union neighborhoods.
The five-day-a-week return is “a home run for downtown,” Scholes said. “Amazon’s decision reinforces the value of in-person work to the success of companies and organizations.”
Foot traffic in downtown Seattle averaged more than 90,000 workers per weekday in July, the most recent data available from the association. That’s a 14% increase from a year earlier, but just 62% of the same month in 2019, before the pandemic altered the workforce.
Rachel Smith, president and CEO of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce, called Amazon’s announcement a “bright spot” for the city. “The recipe for downtown revitalization is not a mystery: employers of all sizes should encourage more in-office activity, and Amazon continues to demonstrate leadership in this area,” Smith said.
Joe Fain, the president and CEO of the Bellevue Chamber, where Amazon is steadily building a second Puget Sound homebase, said Monday that his organization is excited for what the return to office ramp-up “means in igniting a vibrant downtown Bellevue.”
In February 2023, when announcing the decision to soon require workers to be back in the office, Jassy told employees “our communities matter to us, and where we can play a further role in helping them recover from the challenges of the last few years, we’re excited to do so.”
Reducing managers
In Monday’s announcement, Jassy said Amazon was going to reduce the number of managers in the company by early next year to speed up decision making.
As Amazon has grown over the last several years, it added “a lot” of managers, Jassy continued, creating layers of bureaucracy that made it difficult for employees to move quickly and feel ownership of their product. It also filled up calendars with pre-meetings for pre-meetings and created a long line of people who had to sign off on decisions before they moved forward.
Amazon has now asked each organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. It’s unclear if that will result in layoffs.
In the FAQ document, Amazon said “it’s possible that organizations may identify roles that are no longer required.”
“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 our businesses,” Jassy wrote in his note to employees.
The decision comes after months of rolling layoffs, starting as far back as November 2022 and totaling more than 27,000 cuts companywide.
To further reduce unnecessary steps in workflow, Jassy said he had created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for employees to send in examples of processes that could be slimmed down.
Assigned seats
As part of the new return to office mandate, Amazon also plans to bring back assigned desk arrangements, Jassy told employees.
Amazon’s Global Real Estate and Facilities team is still working on a plan to accommodate desks, according to Jassy’s note. Workers are still expected to be in the office five days a week even if their assigned workspace isn’t ready by Jan. 2, Amazon said in the FAQ document.
To prepare for the influx of workers, Amazon said in the document it is adding more shuttle services and ride-sharing options to aid in workers’ commutes, building more in-office phone booths and increasing the capacity of meeting rooms by 75,000 hours per month.
The new policy does not apply to employees who already have a remote work exemption, but it does apply to those who don’t work in the same location as other members of their team, Amazon continued.
The company is also ending a policy that allowed employees to work remotely from anywhere for four weeks out of the year, Amazon said in the FAQ document Monday.
Amazon will continue to collect data about when employees badge in and out of the office, according to the FAQs page, but hopes “that over time this will no longer be necessary.”
The company may have used that type of data recently to crack down on “coffee badging,” a trend across industries where workers game the system by badging in for a coffee break before badging out again shortly after.
Amazon told employees earlier this year it was considering a requirement for the minimum number of hours worked in the office, according to messages shared among employees on the Slack messaging service. Now, in Monday’s note, Amazon said the expectation is that employees will fully work from the office.
Amazon’s culture
In his note to employees Monday, Jassy billed the changes as a way to strengthen Amazon’s culture, something he and other senior leaders have often invoked when discussing their reasons for mandating a return to office.
Over the last several months, Amazon’s executives had questioned whether the company had the right structure in place to meet its ambitions around speed, innovation and connection to customers, Jassy continued.
“We think we can be better,” he said.
“Our culture is unique, and has been one of the most critical parts of our success in our first 29 years,” Jassy wrote. “But, keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time.”