Amazon wants to turn back the company’s clock to how it was before the pandemic: After four years of the online retailer’s employees working from home, CEO Andrew Jassy said Monday he wants to bring all employees back to the office five days a week.
To foster a culture of collaboration, “we have decided to return to working in offices, similar to how we did pre-COVID-19,” Jassy said in a memo to employees posted on Amazon’s website. “Looking back over the past five years, we continue to believe that there are significant benefits to being together in the office.”
Jassy also said that having employees work together in person improves team functioning and strengthens the company’s culture. The new mandate will go into effect on January 2, 2025.
In February 2023, Amazon forced all employees to return to the office for three days, sparking protests from some employees.
Jassy acknowledged that while full-time office work was the norm before the pandemic, the company made exceptions for employees with special circumstances to work remotely, and that such leniency will likely continue.
“People worked remotely if they or their children got sick, if there was some kind of household emergency, if they were traveling to see a client or partner, or if they needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment,” he wrote in the memo.
Some labor experts have said that companies ending remote work could lead to employee turnover, noting that many workers have come to rely on the flexibility of working from home at least part of the time since the pandemic began. Meanwhile, at LinkedIn, economic historian Dror Poleg speculated that Amazon’s new policy is aimed at driving some employees away.
“Companies issue return-to-office orders when they want to reduce staffing,” he said, “so the easiest way to fire employees is to force them back to the office.”
At least some Amazon employees appear to be frustrated about being ordered back to the office, voicing their frustration in internal messaging channels, according to The New York Times. “This situation is very depressing and demotivating, to say the least,” one message read, according to the paper.
contributed to this report.