Amazon boss tells staff to return to office five days a week

Amazon has told all its staff to return to the office five days a week next year, “the way we were before the onset of Covid”, the boss has said.

In a memo to employees, chief executive Andy Jassy said the company expected people to be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances from January 2.

Amazon made it mandatory in 2023 for corporate staff to be in the office three days a week, a significant change after the Covid pandemic engendered a shift towards remote and hybrid working.

Mr Jassy said this had “strengthened our conviction about the benefits” of being in the office full-time.

That policy led to some backlash last year among workers at Amazon, with more than 20,000 people signing a petition urging the firm to reconsider the return-to-office mandate.

Workers at its Seattle headquarters in the US staged a walkout which also followed widespread cost-cutting at the firm, with layoffs affecting thousands of jobs since late 2023.

Mr Jassy stressed in his memo that the change would not force people to be in the office if they had extenuating circumstances, or if they had an agreement to work remotely with their manager.

“Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week,” he said.

“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.

“This was understood, and will be moving forward as well.”

But being back in the office would make the business “better set up to invent, collaborate and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business”, Mr Jassy said.

Amazon will also bring back assigned desks, replacing hot-desking, in offices that were organised that way prior to the pandemic, including its head offices in the US.

Elsewhere, the chief executive also said he wanted to cut down the number of managers across the group in order to reduce layers of bureaucracy.

Having too many managers was creating unnecessary processes, meetings and layers which “waste valuable time”, he argued.

Amazon, like other tech companies, ramped up hiring during the pandemic to meet demand from people locked down at home who were increasingly shopping online.

Amazon’s workforce, in warehouses and offices, doubled to more than 1.6 million people in about two years.

Mr Jassy said the firm wanted to increase the ratio of “individual contributors” to managers by at least 15% by April 2025.

Amanda Gearing, senior organiser for GMB, the trade union representing Amazon workers in the UK, said: “This is yet another example of how Amazon has won its reputation as one of the worst employers around.”

She said “record numbers” of staff were joining the union, after a ballot of workers at its Coventry site for union recognition failed to reach a majority in July.