Employees can no longer work from home two days a week starting next year
CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff, “We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID.”
Jassy said he believes the move will better set up Amazon “to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business.” The policy will go into effect on Jan 2, 2025.
The CEO of the retail giant did carve out some exceptions to the new policy, saying, “Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely.” That policy will remain, but people will no longer be able to voluntarily work remotely two days a week, as is the current policy.
Jassy also said that the company wants each s-team organization to “to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.” It wasn’t clear if this meant the company would hire more people, conduct layoffs, or do both to achieve this new ratio. He said the move will “remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.”
“If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day,” he said.
Jassy also said Amazon (AMZN) will return to having assigned desk arrangements at its U.S. headquarters in Puget Sound, Washington and Arlington, Virginia.
Previous reports showed that Amazon was keeping tabs on how much its employees were coming into the office and sending messages to delinquent employees. It also wanted to make sure employees weren’t clocking into the office and then leaving soon after, telling workers they needed to be in for at least two hours to get credit for a day in the office.
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