Amazon Employees To Do Work From Office Thrice A Week

Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy announced the policy in a memo to staff on Friday. The new changes will come into effect on 1 May.

“I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office," Jassy wrote.

The CEO said the company has not finalised the details of the policy yet. Jassy added that he wanted to share the decision — made at a meeting of the company's senior leadership team this week — as early as possible. 

The company added there would be some exceptions to the rule - customer support roles and salespeople would have the option of working remotely.

The Seattle-based company in October 2021 said it would let individual teams decide how many days corporate employees would be expected to work from office in a week.

Getting a significant number of staff to return could boost the commercial districts around Amazon locations. Outside of ailing downtown Seattle, where Amazon is by far the largest employer, the company is a major office tenant in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Austin, Texas, and the Los Angeles area, among other cities.

Last month Amazon announced it would lay off 18,000 corporate positions in its efforts to prune payrolls that rapidly expanded during the pandemic lockdown.

Since the Covid pandemic has subsided globally, several companies have started calling their employees back to the office.

This year in January, Starbucks told its corporate employees to plan to work from the office three days a week. Disney is asking employees to plan for four in-office days starting in March. While Walmart has said that would require its tech teams to plan regular in-office work days.

(With agencies input)