Amazon mandates five days a week in office starting next year

Tech giant Amazon will require employees to return to working at company offices five days per week beginning next year, toughening a prior three-day mandate.

"When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant," CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a letter to employees globally on Monday (Sep 16).

He said the experience of a three-day mandate "strengthened our conviction about the benefits" of in-office work.

"We've observed that it's easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and teams tend to be better connected to one another," he added.

Companies have been allowing many employees to work from home since the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving downtown offices nearly empty in a number of US cities such as San Francisco and Seattle. However, some tech firms are beginning to mandate employees to return to their offices two or three days per week.

Amazon has taken a tougher stance than many of its rivals as the pandemic has become less of a daily threat. Employees have described to Reuters how Amazon has required them to report to, in some cases, distant offices or move to Seattle to keep their jobs.

And some employees who were consistently out of compliance with the existing three-day mandate were told they were "voluntarily resigning", and were locked out of Amazon's systems.

A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to say whether the new mandate will be as stringent, nor did an employee Q&A shared with Reuters on Monday make it clear.

The mandate has been deeply unpopular among a vocal group of employees who have said working from home is both effective and spares time and money for commuting. In May last year, workers at Amazon's Seattle headquarters staged a walkout protesting changes to the e-commerce giant's climate policy, layoffs and a return-to-office mandate.

As part of an organisational restructuring, Amazon is looking to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 per cent by the end of the first quarter of 2025. In the Q&A, Amazon said "some organisations may identify roles that are no longer required" without giving additional details.

Amazon also is eliminating a prior programme that allowed workers the option to work from anywhere for four months per year, according to the Q&A.

Jassy said that to accommodate the lifestyle changes necessary, the new policy would start on Jan 2, 2025.

After a wave of layoffs, in 2023 Amazon was reported to have 300,000 to 350,000 corporate employees globally.

This number is separate from their warehouse and delivery workers, who make up a much larger portion of Amazon's total workforce of about 1.5 million.