Amazon demands staff return to offices five days a week

But not everyone is happy about it

Amazon has become the latest tech giant to order staff back to offices full time.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, communicated the policy change to employees via a letter on the company website which told staff that "we've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID."

The full return is scheduled from January 2025. The company is also planning to end the practice of hot desking in its offices in Arlington and Puget Sound. Staff will be assigned regular workspaces instead as they were before he pandemic. In the EU, where “agile” desking was already the norm, it will continue.

Jassy stated in the letter that the aim of the policy revision was to organise the company in such a way as to "invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other".

Amazon has more than 1.5 million full-time and part-time employees globally. It is the latest in a long line of both tech companies and other corporates to try to reshape employee expectations of hybrid working. The company has recently announced its intention to invest £8bn in UK datacentres over the next few years.

Meta, Dell, Google and perhaps most famously X, have all changed their stances on remote working over the course of the last 18 months. Companies are increasingly moving from trying to attract workers back to offices with perks and benefits to compulsion. Indeed, Amazon has been trying to encourage workers back to the office for some time.

Jassy actually begin his letter with a notification that the ration of managers to individual contributors would be reduced by 15% by the end of Q1 next year, just in case any middle managers thought about trying to hold out against the policy.

The company is giving them a few months to get their houses in order.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward – our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances.”

In revealing the implementation timeframe for the Amazon office return, the company said: “We understand that some of our teammates 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. To help ensure a smooth transition, we’re going to make this new expectation active on 2 January 2025.”

The debate over whether knowledge workers are more productive in offices or homes continues to rage. The Labour government has criticised the culture of presenteeism, but concrete steps to do so are not going to land well with employers.