- Amazon employees will need to be back in offices at least three days per week starting in May.
- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the change to corporate employees on Friday.
- Jassy cited improved chances to communicate, innovate, and learn from each other in offices.
Amazon’s corporate employees will be required to spend at least three days per week working in offices starting in May, CEO Andy Jassy told employees in a memo shared Friday.
Jassy said the decision was made by himself and Amazon’s “s-team” of senior executives this week, and will allow employees to collaborate and communicate more openly with each other by working in person more often.
“I know that for some employees, adjusting again to a new way of working will take some time,” Jassy wrote in the Friday note. “But I’m very optimistic about the positive impact this will have in how we serve and invent on behalf of customers, as well as on the growth and success of our employees.”
The new policy marks a significant departure from Jassy’s prior comments, as he said during a panel in September 2022 that the e-commerce giant had no plan to require employees to return to offices. At the time, Jassy said most employees were on a hybrid schedule that was decided on by individual managers.
“We don’t have a plan to require people to come back,” he said at the event, per CNBC. “We don’t right now. We’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.”
He continued: “I do think there are some things that are harder to do remotely. I think it’s a little harder to invent remotely.”
In October 2021, Jassy axed a similar plan to the one announced Friday that would have required employees to return to offices amid the pandemic, and instead allowed individual teams to decide when their workers needed to be in offices.
