Amazon is ordering employees to return to the office five days a week as it ends its hybrid work policy.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo to employees that the changes would take effect in January.
“We have decided to go back to working in the office, as we did before the pandemic began,” he said, adding that this would enable staff to “invent better, collaborate and be fully connected with each other”.
Jassy has long been known to be skeptical of remote work, but Amazon staff have previously been allowed to work from home two days a week.
Amazon’s push to bring employees back to offices has been a source of tension within the company, which employs more than 1.5 million full- and part-time workers around the world.
Employees at its Seattle headquarters protested last year after the company tightened fully remote work policies it had implemented during the pandemic.
Amazon later fired the protest organizers, sparking allegations of unfair retaliation and a dispute with labor authorities.
In his message on Monday, Jassy said he worried that Amazon, which has long prided itself on maintaining its startup ambitions while growing into a tech giant, was losing its culture because of inflexible work arrangements and too many layers of bureaucracy.
Jassy, who succeeded founder Jeff Bezos as CEO in 2021, said he had set up a “bureaucratic mailbox” for employees to complain about unnecessary rules and was asking managers to restructure the company to give them more oversight of employees.
Amazon said the changes could lead to job cuts.
In addition to returning to a five-day work week in the office, Amazon also announced it would end hot desking in the US, but will keep it in most of Europe.
The company said that, as it did before the pandemic, employees can work from home in unusual circumstances, such as a sick child or family emergency.
But unless an exemption is granted, Jassy said, “we expect people will come into the office unless there are extraordinary circumstances.”
Amazon’s stance contrasts with that of the UK government, which has promised to make flexible working a default right from day one as part of a new Employment Rights Bill due to be published next month.
Business Minister Jonathan Reynolds told The Times that the government wanted to end the “culture of attending the office” and that there were “real economic benefits” to people working from home.
He said a balance had to be struck, but flexible working arrangements could help companies recruit a wider range of talent.
Remote work peaked during the pandemic, and while many companies have begun to bring employees back in 2022, the return has been incomplete.
As of this summer, about 12% of full-time U.S. employees reported working entirely remotely, and another 27% had hybrid work policies in place, according to a monthly survey by economists José María Valero, Nicholas Bloom and Stephen J. Davis.
Banking chiefs like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon are among the most prominent critics of remote work and likely to call for a full-time presence in the office.
But the shift is spreading to other industries, with UPS and Dell bringing staff back to the office full time this year.
In the memo, Jassy said Amazon’s experience shifting to a hybrid policy has “strengthened our belief in the benefits” of working in person.
But Stanford’s Bloom said he didn’t think the announcement signaled a broader shift in labor policy, noting his data showed that the amount of time spent in the office has remained fairly stable for over a year.
“While there’s one well-known company that’s stopping work-from-home, there are others that appear to be expanding it – they just aren’t getting the press,” he said.