SAN FRANCISCO — Amazon is asking workers to return to the office five days a week starting in January, marking the first of the Big Tech companies to require a full week in office post pandemic.
“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’s note to staff said. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.
The news at Amazon comes as more companies pull back on remote work and crack down on enforcing return-to-office policies. Though Amazon is the first Big Tech company requiring a full week in the office, other tech companies have slowly been tweaking their policies over the past couple of years and taking some hard-line stances. SAP, AT&T and Dell are among those that have rolled back more flexible policies. As a result, some workers have pushed back with threats and protests, or even quit over the new policies.
Tech companies were among the first to openly embrace flexible work policies during the height of the pandemic, touting that the companies had found successful ways to operate in remote environments. But more than four years later, many of those companies have brought employees back to the office, at least part time. Even pandemic darling Zoom, which helped tens of thousands of people work remotely, has called people back to the office part time. Other companies, outside of tech that have reversed remote work policies include Disney, Goldman Sachs and Bank of America.
Jassy said Amazon’s new policy would be similar to the pre-pandemic era: Employees may still have some exceptions to the rule if their child is sick, they have an emergency or they need to work in an isolated environment, for example. But they will no longer be able to work from home two days a week without a reason, unless they have a remote work exception approved by their supervisor.
The company did not comment on how it intends to enforce the rule. And while Jassy recognizes that some employees “may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments,” he expects everyone to be compliant by Jan. 2.
Jassy also said he plans to increase the ratio of employees to managers to flatten the organization and allow teams to move faster and decrease bureaucracy.
Moves such as Amazon’s come with consequences, said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work. Choudhury said research has shown that when companies roll back flexible work policies, they often lose top performers, diverse workers and job candidates. It is also often a way for companies to lower their head count without layoffs.
“This seems to be a step back in time,” he said. “It’s regressive leadership.”
Choudhury doesn’t believe the tide is turning on hybrid work. About 41 percent of people did their jobs with hybrid arrangements as of Sept. 1, according to data from the Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes conducted by WFH Research, a group of researchers from the University of Chicago, MIT, Stanford University and Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México. That number has hovered between 40 and 50 percent since January.
“We are squarely in the hybrid world,” Choudhury said. “The challenge is how to figure out hybrid.”
The best way is to leave it up to teams to determine how often, when and where they should be meeting, Choudhury said.
While Amazon is rolling flexibility back, other companies like job review service Glassdoor are doubling down. The company closed its last remaining two offices in the U.S. as it continues to be remote-first.
