Amazon tells staff to get back in the office

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Amazon is ending its hybrid work policy and ordering staff back to the office five days a week.

The change will go into effect in January, boss Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff announcing the new rule.

He said he believed the move would help staff be "better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other".

Mr Jassy has long been known as a sceptic of remote work, but Amazon staff were previously allowed to work from home two days a week.

The company's push to get its corporate staff back into the office has been a source of tension within the company, which employs more than 1.5 million people globally in full- and part-time positions, including hundreds of thousands corporate roles.

Staff at its Seattle headquarters staged a protest last year as the company tightened the full remote work allowance that was put in place during the pandemic.

Amazon subsequently fired the organiser of that protest, prompting claims of unfair retaliation, a dispute that has been taken up with labour officials.

In his message on Monday, Mr Jassy said he was worried that Amazon - which has long prided itself on preserving the intensity of a start-up while growing to become a tech giant - was seeing its corporate culture diluted by flexible work and too many bureaucratic layers.

He said he had created a "bureaucracy mailbox" for staff to make complaints about unnecessary rules and the company was asking managers to reorganise so that managers are overseeing more people.

Amazon said those changes could lead to job cuts, which would be communicated at the team level.

In addition to returning to the office five days a week, the company said it would bring back "assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way" including its US headquarters.

The company said staff could still work from home in unusual circumstances, such as a sick child or house emergency, as was the case before the pandemic.

But unless they have been granted an exemption, Mr Jassy said: "Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances".

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Remote work peaked during the pandemic. Many companies started recalling staff in 2022, but the return has been incomplete.

As of this summer, about 12% of full-time employees in the US were fully remote and another 27% reported having hybrid work policies in place, according to a monthly survey by economists Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J Davis.

Bank bosses such as JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon have long been among the most high-profile figures critical of remote work and likely to demand full-time office attendance.

But the attitude has also spread to other industries, with UPS and Dell recalling staff back to the office full-time this year.

In his memo, Mr Jassy said that Amazon's experience with its move to a hybrid policy had "strengthened our conviction about the benefits" of working in person.

But Prof Bloom, a professor at Stanford, said he did not think the announcements were a sign of a wider shift in work policies, noting that his data has found time spent at the office has been fairly stable for more than a year.

"For every high profile company cancelling work-from-home, there's others that seem to be expanding it - they just don't get picked up in the media," he said.