Amazon’s plans to return to the office are causing concern and debate among employees

Some Amazon workers said they were surprised and disappointed. On social media, employees complained about the longer commute times. Others were fine with the change, saying they were already in the office at least four days a week.

“People are not happy about it,” an Amazon software engineer said in an interview on Tuesday. “It seems unreasonable and contradicts the data that shows people are productive outside of the office.”

Amazon’s new office policy marks a significant shift in a tech industry where most employers have moved to hybrid work. Only 7% of large tech companies require employees to be in the office five days a week, compared with 33% across all U.S. companies, according to Flex Index, a software company that tracks return-to-office efforts. Tech companies have often pushed big changes in office policies during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition to the new return-to-office rules, Amazon announced Monday that it may thin out its leadership staff. In an internal memo to employees, Amazon left open the possibility that some positions could be cut as the company restructures its departments to have fewer managers per team.

“It is possible that organizations will identify roles that are no longer needed,” the internal memo said.

Critics fear that these measures could allow Amazon to downsize its workforce without official layoffs. Amazon said its return-to-office rules are independent of its restructuring plans. A company spokesperson said the changes are an attempt to strengthen the company’s culture.

Amazon executives defended the changes by pointing to the company’s hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers who had to go to work every day, even during the pandemic.

“I think about all of our employees in the fulfillment centers. They come into the office every day,” said Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president of marketplace business, on Tuesday. “They can’t do their jobs if they’re not right there in the fulfillment center.”

Amazon told employees it was working on the logistics of the new policy. In the internal memo, the company said it planned to set up an additional 3,500 phone booths and that employees would be assigned desks.

A key theme of CEO Andy Jassy’s announcement on Monday was tackling red tape at the company, which has grown as the company’s workforce has expanded to over 350,000 employees. Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people in total.

In the past, Jassy and other senior Amazon officials have said they wanted to ensure the company remained agile. The company tries to avoid what is known as the “Day 2 mentality,” a dreaded term within Amazon that means the company has stagnated. Founder Jeff Bezos has described it as “stagnation, followed by irrelevance, followed by an agonizing, painful decline, and followed by death.”

Amazon said in an internal memo that fewer managers would help the company “increase the agility and responsiveness of our team members, strengthen and invigorate their sense of accountability, and bring decisions closer to the front lines where they impact customers.”

While some employees and other observers predicted resistance, Amazon made clear that it would enforce its policies. The company said in a memo that it would log when employees swipe their ID cards to enter office space.

It is hoped “that this will no longer be necessary over time.”

Other companies are paying attention to what Amazon is doing, said Rob Sadow, CEO of Flex Index.

Big companies will ask, “Do they know something we don’t know?” he said. “Is there something in their data or the way they work that suggests full-time employment is better?”

Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford University, said that while some large companies may try to copy Amazon’s efforts, it will be difficult to convince employees to return to the five-day week.

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According to a study by Bloom and his colleagues, employees reported working from home 28 percent of the time in August. This figure has not changed since 2023. Before the pandemic, this figure was 7 percent.

There has also been little change in the occupancy rate of company offices. According to security provider Kastle Systems, office occupancy in ten major US cities has been around 50 percent for months. On Fridays, it is particularly difficult for employers to get their employees back to the office.

“We’re clearly not going back to 2019,” Bloom said. “It’s just a different era now.”

Write to Sebastian Herrera at [email protected] and Joseph De Avila at [email protected]