Amazon is asking employees to return to the office full time.
In a memo published by e-commerce giant Amazon on Monday, CEO Andy Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos in 2020, said the move to end the company’s hybrid model aims to “put us better in the position to invent, collaborate, and fully connect with each other and our culture to deliver what’s best for our customers and our business.”
He said the company’s three-day workweek policy, introduced in 2023, only reinforced the view that a full return was necessary.
“Looking back over the last five years, we continue to see great benefits to being in the office together,” Jassy said.
The changes will take effect in January 2025. The company will continue to honor special circumstances, such as caring for a sick child, as well as pre-approved work-from-home or hybrid work arrangements.
Amazon joins a growing list of major US companies, including Boeing, JPMorgan Chase and UPS, returning to a five-day work week policy.
But the vast majority of U.S. companies still offer hybrid arrangements, according to data from FlexIndex, a company that tracks corporate office policies.
The data shows that large companies are leading the way in promoting full-time office work.
But it’s worth noting that Jassy said he wanted to run Amazon as if it were “the biggest startup in the world,” a notion that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has often emphasized.
“It means a passion to constantly invent for our customers, a strong sense of urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s competition!), high ownership, fast decision-making, tenacity and frugality, close collaboration (inventing and solving hard problems requires working closely with your teammates), and a shared commitment to each other,” Jassy says.
Jassy also announced moves to cut “red tape” within the company, signaling an unintended consequence of Amazon’s aggressive hiring once it reopens post-pandemic — and opening the door to possible layoffs. Jassy called on the employee unit to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%” by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
“Over the past few years, we’ve grown our team rapidly and significantly, which naturally led to us adding a lot of managers,” Jassy said. “In the process, we’ve added more layers than we had before, which has resulted in deliverables that we wanted to change.”
An Amazon spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
CNBC’s Annie Palmer contributed.
