Amazon has mandated that employees must work in the office five days a week, starting at the beginning of next year.
In what is potentially the final chapter of the tech giant’s 18-month-long return-to-office (RTO) saga, Amazon has extended its three-day in-office mandate to the whole working week.
In a letter to employees posted on the company’s website on Monday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy suggested the experience of a three-day in-office mandate has “strengthened our conviction about the benefits” of working in the office.
Jassy wrote:
To address the second issue of being 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, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”
Amazon’s previous RTO mandate, requiring employees to work in the office three days a week, was announced in February 2023 and implemented in May of the same year.
An Amazon spokesperson had yet to respond to Reuters clarifying whether workers who defy the new mandate will be forced into “voluntary resignation” similarly to those who defied the previous three-days-a-week in-office mandate.
Amazon is the first major tech business to mandate workers return to the office for the entire work week.
The Story Of Amazon’s Post-Pandemic Journey To Full In-Office Working
The introduction of Amazon’s three-day RTO mandate led to significant backlash in May 2023, with hundreds of Amazon workers in Seattle protesting outside the company’s HQ and thousands signing a petition opposing the mandate. Amazon later sacked the organiser of the protest, leading to allegations of unfair retaliation. This dispute has since been brought to the attention of labour officials.
Before this, Amazon had empowered team leaders to determine their own RTO strategies.
When the mandate was announced, Jassy said the decision was driven by an assessment of what worked well and what didn’t during the pandemic. Jassy noted that the senior leadership team had closely monitored employee performance and collaboration and sought input from other business leaders. They argued that employees were typically more engaged when working in person.
In July 2023, Amazon asked some corporate employees to relocate to other cities as part of its RTO policy.
Additionally, Business Insider reported that leaked Amazon emails and messages suggested that if workers refused to relocate to their new teams’ “hubs”, Amazon would grant them 60 days to find a new team in their current city or force them into “voluntary resignation”.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser confirmed that employee relocations were taking place but did not provide details on how many workers were affected or address claims that some employees in smaller offices were required to move to larger, central offices. Glasser stated that Amazon would offer “relocation benefits” to those asked to move and would consider exceptions on an individual basis.
In late August 2023, Jassy reportedly told remote employees unwilling to follow Amazon’s RTO policy that remaining with the company “is not going to work out for you”. This statement preceded Amazon’s decision to give managers the authority to terminate employees who do not comply with the requirement to work in the office three days a week.
In October, Amazon’s RTO mandate escalated, and managers were approved to terminate employees who refused to work in the office three days a week.
An internal system provided supervisors with updated guidelines for enforcing the RTO mandate. Additionally, Amazon gave managers greater authority to take disciplinary action against employees who fail to work in the office at least three days a week, including the option to terminate their employment.
While not technically an escalation of its RTO policy, news broke this July that Amazon was intent on cracking down on employees skirting the mandate by beginning to track the hours corporate workers spend in the office.
Business Insider reported the move was to address the purported rise of “coffee badging”, the trend of workers badging into the office, getting coffee and then leaving shortly after. Reportedly, several Amazon teams, including the cloud computing and retail arms, were informed that a minimum of two hours per visit was required to be considered formal office attendance.
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