Amazon wants corporate employees back in the office three days a week

Amazon is tightening its in-office requirements for corporate workers.

In a corporate blog post, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that as of May 1, 2023, Amazon will require corporate employees to spend the majority of their working time (at least three days per week) in the office.

This reverses a policy Amazon enacted in the second half of 2021 that said director-level executives would decide whether their employees would work remotely, in-office, or on a hybrid basis. This marked 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.”

[Read more: Amazon reveals another new return-to-office plan]

According to Jassy, in the three years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic when the company initially sent corporate employees home to work remotely, Amazon has observed that it’s “easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues.”

Jassy said this is especially true for new employees and that people tend to be “more engaged, observant, and attuned” in-person. In addition, he said working in-person supports collaboration and invention, resulting from freer “energy and riffing on one another’s ideas,” and that learning, connectivity and culture are all strengthened by working together in person.

Amazon has not yet worked out all the details of how it will execute the return of thousands of employees to offices around the globe, but is finalizing plans and said the situation will improve over time. Jassy said there will be some exceptions to the policy, particularly for some employees in roles such as sales and customer support.

“I know that for some employees, adjusting again to a new way of working will take some time,” said Jassy. “But I’m very optimistic about the positive impact this will have in how we serve and invent on behalf of customers, as well as on the growth and success of our employees”

Amazon is enacting this change as it plans to eliminate just over 18,000 roles in 2023, with the majority of eliminations in its Amazon Stores and PXT organizations. Coffee giant Starbucks also recently enacted a three-day-in-office requirement for most corporate employees.

Disney CEO Bob Iger recently told employees that they must return to the office four days a week starting March 1, 2023. In September 2022, Apple required its employees to return to the office three days a week. And chief Amazon rival Walmart is requiring employees at its tech hubs to work in-person two days a week as part of a plan to scale back its global technology hub network.