Amazon will ask employees to spend at least three days a week in the office

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Amazon.com Inc. is rolling out an updated remote work policy that will require employees to spend at least three days per week in the office.

Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy announced the move today in an internal company memo.

Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Amazon told all employees to work from home if their jobs permitted. In August 2021, the company informed staffers that a return to the office was planned for January 2022. At the time, it intended to implement a hybrid work model that would have seen employees spend three days per week in the office and two days working remotely. 

A few months later, Amazon revised its plans. Jassy stated in an October 2021 memo that individual teams would determine their remote work arrangements instead of following a company-wide policy. That practice has been in place since.

The update that Jassy announced today will see Amazon implement the hybrid work model it had originally planned to roll out in early 2022. In today’s memo, Jassy stated that there will be exceptions at certain business units including some sales and customer support groups. However, most corporate employees will be expected to come into the office three days per week. 

“We made this decision at a s-team meeting earlier this week, and for a number of reasons (including the adjustments I know will be required for some of our employees), I wanted to share with you as early as I could even though we haven’t worked out all the execution details yet,” Jassy wrote today. The company’s senior leadership team is known as the s-team internally. 

Amazon intends to finalize its return to office plans in the coming weeks. The new hybrid work policy will be implemented across the company on May 1. 

“It’s not simple to bring many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan,” Jassy wrote in today’s memo. “We know that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months (and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work.”

Amazon’s rollout of the new hybrid work policy follows similar moves at other major tech companies. Google LLC, one of Amazon’s top rivals in the cloud market, asked employees to spend at least three days a week in the office last April. Apple Inc. implemented a similar policy in September. 

Photo: Amazon