Amazon to return to five days a week in-office; reducing bureaucracy
Most Amazon employees will soon be expected to work from a corporate office five days a week, and the company wants a higher employee-to-manager ratio.
In a memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company will return to a standard five-day-a-week office schedule for the majority of corporate employees starting Jan. 2, 2025. Jassy said Amazon is waiting a few months to give employees time to make adjustments to their schedules as needed.
In October 2021, Jassy said the company would leave it up to individual team directors to decide how often their employees work in the office. This was a change from Amazon’s previous return-to-work plan, announced in June 2021, in which it set a baseline of three days a week in the office, giving employees the option to work remotely up to two days a week.
Prior to that, in March 2021, Amazon said that its goal was to “return to an office-centric culture as our baseline.” Once the return to office is in place, Jassy said if an employee has a personal emergency such as a sick child or needs to finish coding in a more isolated environment, they will be able to work remotely for a short period of time.
In addition, some employees may already have a remote work exemption from a senior manager in place.
"In summary, we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another," Jassy said in the memo. "If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits."
As part of its return-to-office plan, Amazon is also bringing back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way, including the U.S. headquarters locations in Washington and Virginia. Locations that had agile desk arrangements before the pandemic, including much of Europe, will continue to operate that way.
[READ MORE: Amazon expands worker flexibility, adds more employee resources]
Amazon seeks to cut red tape
Amazon is also asking its senior leadership team organizations to increase the ratio of individual employees to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
"As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers," Jassy said in the memo. "In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today."
Jassy also said he has created a “bureaucracy mailbox” where employees can submit via email examples of where they see potential bureaucracy or unnecessary process that could be eliminated.
"I will read these emails and action them accordingly," said Jassy.
