In his memo sent Monday notifying corporate workers about returning to the office five days per week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy touted advantages of working in-person, citing the ability to learn, collaborate, brainstorm, and connect with colleagues more effectively.
It’s similar to a message Jassy shared last year when Amazon asked workers to get back in the office three days per week. “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,” Jassy wrote in Monday’s memo.
The latest return-to-office mandate at Amazon adds another wrinkle to the ongoing debate over remote work and the impact on employee productivity in a new hybrid work world shaped by the pandemic.
Amazon employees will be expected to work from the office five days a week starting in January unless there are “extenuating circumstances,” Jassy wrote as part of a broader update on Amazon’s culture.
Amazon joins a small list of employers such as UPS, Boeing, and some smaller companies that are asking at least some employees back in the office every weekday.
A report from Flex Index, which tracks flexible work policy trends, found that 79% of tech companies offer flexible work policies, and just 3% have a full-time in-office requirement.
Companies with full in-office mandates typically cite benefits such as better collaboration and communication, strengthening their culture, etc.
However, a new study found that a hybrid schedule with two days a week working from home does not damage performance. “Hybrid work is a win-win-win for employee productivity, performance, and retention,” said Stanford University professor Nicholas Bloom, one of the researchers on the study.
Amazon could be seeing negative organizational impacts from remote and hybrid work, said Emily Cox Pahnke, an associate professor of management and organization at the University of Washington Foster School of Business.
Cox Pahnke was part of a study that examined how communication patterns within organizations changed when remote work took off, in regard to who communicates with whom.
“Organizations like Amazon now have a few years worth of their own remote and hybrid work arrangement data with which they can see the impact of that fundamental shift on their organizations,” she said.
As part of his memo on Monday, Jassy also said Amazon also plans to reduce the total number of managers inside its teams, aiming to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025,” he wrote.
Some employees speculate that the in-office mandates are a way to “thin out Amazon’s workforce,” the Wall Street Journal noted Monday. Amazon cut 27,000 corporate and tech jobs globally in two major waves of layoffs in early 2023, before the three-day mandate kicked in.
A research paper published in May found that back-to-office mandates drive employees away, with senior employees leaving at the highest rates.
Amazon’s three-day mandate last year sparked a backlash among some employees and played a role in a protest by employees at its Seattle headquarters.
Many white-collar workers embraced working from home amid the pandemic, given the added flexibility and reduced commute time.
The new policy will likely have ramifications for recruiting and diversity, said Crystal Farh, a professor of management at the UW’s Foster School of Business. It will deter potential candidates who disagree with the mandate or can’t come commit to five days per week at the office.
“This is one thing Amazon needs to be really careful about, which is building an in-person culture where everyone can thrive,” Farh said. “Some people are truly more productive when working remotely.”
In some ways, Amazon was a first-mover in regard to its three-day mandate last year. Companies often follow each other when it comes to organizational decisions like return-to-office, said Viviane Lopuch, executive director of the Center for Leadership Formation at Seattle University’s Albers School of Business and Economics.
It remains to be seen whether other companies will follow Amazon’s lead on the five-day rule.
Typeform, a survey and form software company that became a remote-first organization in 2021, certainly will not be one of them.
“Amazon’s announcement today is another example of corporate America getting this issue wrong,” said Laura Daniels, chief people officer at Typeform. “The push for ‘return to office’ is corporate-centric, not employee-centric.”
Daniels said remote work is the company’s highest-scoring dimension of its engagement survey.
Hybrid policies — not fully remote, but not fully in-office — have “emerged as a way for employers to meet people in the middle,” Axios reported, citing a Morning Consult study that found workers now prefer hybrid over fully remote.
A survey of global CEOs by the KPMG consulting firm found that 34% of CEOs envision corporate office employees to be back in the physical workplace in the next three years. That’s down substantially from the survey last year, which found 62% of CEOs who said the same.
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