Hello, Memo readers!
Amazon is giving up on remote work.
The e-commerce giant is ordering workers back to the office five days a week and wants corporate managers to oversee more employees in a move it says will improve the company’s culture.
CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff that Amazon has “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.
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.
Read the full story about Amazon’s decision here.
One (still) big number: 80 hours
The maximum amount of time junior investment bankers at JPMorgan Chase will be allowed to work a week
The move is a first for the bank. Bank of America will also be introducing a new timekeeping tool that would require junior bankers to rigorously explain how their hours were spent for the work week and would require bankers to log their hours daily rather than weekly.
The adaptation of new measures comes after the death of a 35-year-old associate at BofA, who was revealed to have been working numerous 100-hour weeks. At the time of his death, Leo Lukenas III had been working with a team on completing a $2 billion deal. Read the full story here.
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Send questions, comments, and fewer work hours to talk@qz.com. This edition of The Memo was written by Ben Kesslen, Rachel Dalloo, and Morgan Haefner.