Amazon now requiring employees to be in office 5 days a week
These employees now will be expected to be in the office five days a week “outside of extenuating circumstances” or unless they have been granted an exception by their organization’s S-team leader.
Members of Amazon’s corporate staff will be required to spend five days a week in the office, beginning in January.
“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” CEO Andy Jassy announced in a Monday memo. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”
He believes the new policy will benefit the company in several ways.
“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. “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.”
The company’s previous return-to-work policy required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. These employees now will be expected to be in the office five days a week “outside of extenuating circumstances” or unless they have been granted an exception by their organization’s S-team leader, which is the group of executives that report to Amazon’s CEO.
“Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week,” Jassy wrote. “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.”
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Amazon also plans to streamline its corporate structure by having fewer managers to “remove layers and flatten organizations,” he said. Each S-team organization will be expected to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, he said. Individual contributors refers to employees who typically do not manage other staffers.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote in the memo. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency, high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems) and a shared commitment to each other.”