Amazon orders employees to return to pre-Covid working hours

When 2025 comes, Amazon will order its employees to return to the old days and work in the office at assigned desks five days a week.

“We understand that some of our teammates may have arranged their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office on a regular basis five days a week will require some adjustments,” CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to employees on Monday.

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Jassy’s letter buries the main point, so to speak. After writing about his personal Amazon story, which began in 1997, he argues for two points: reducing bureaucracy in the company and maintaining Amazon’s corporate culture. Corporate culture is a code word for “coming to the office five days a week.”

First off, Jassy said Amazon’s growth has led to more managers, and that has led to what he calls “artifacts we’d like to change.” That means there are more layers and processes and “pre-decision meetings for the pre-decision meetings for the decision meetings,” which slows things down. In other words, it sounds a bit like Amazon has a case of “ineffective middle management sycophants.” The company wants the top tier of leadership to fix that by the end of Q1 2025.

Then Jassy gets to the point that will affect employees: they will have to be in the office five days a week. Amazon will also assign desks to its employees, just like before the pandemic forced most people to work from home.

“We have decided that we will return to working in the office as we did before COVID hit,” Jassy wrote. “Looking back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the benefits of working together in the office are significant. … We have found that it is easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice and reinforce our culture; collaboration, brainstorming and invention are easier and more effective; teaching and learning from each other is smoother and teams tend to be more connected. If anything, the past 15 months of being back in the office at least three days a week have strengthened our belief in the benefits.”

What has also caught Amazon’s attention over the past 15 months is “coffee badging.” In May 2023, the company implemented a hybrid work schedule that required employees to be in the office three days a week. A group of employees protested this policy, arguing in part that it would increase Amazon’s carbon footprint. In September, the company began monitoring when and how often employees swiped their IDs to enter an Amazon office building. This was done after it was discovered that some employees were swiping their IDs to enter a building, grabbing a coffee, and then returning home to do their work. The practice was dubbed “coffee badging.” The problem is not unique to Amazon, and no official policy has been implemented in response; however, the Seattle Times reported that the company had begun conversations with employees who were not spending “a significant amount of time in the office.”

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Around that time, Amazon also instructed its employees to move closer to a company building so they could do more in-office work if they moved farther away when telecommuting was the norm. In response, some employees quit. Jassy also said that while employees could disagree with the three-day rule, they still had to comply. And if they couldn’t, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.”

Now Amazon is taking the next step and returning to on-site work five days a week.

“Before the pandemic, not everyone was in the office five days a week,” Jassy wrote in his letter this week. “If you or your child were sick, if you had a home emergency, if you were traveling to meet with clients or partners, if you needed a day or two to complete programming in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. That was understood and will continue to be the case going forward. But before the pandemic, it was not a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will continue to be the case going forward – we expect people to be in the office except in extenuating circumstances (like those mentioned above) or if you’ve already had an exemption to work remotely approved by your S team leader.”