Amazon orders workers back to office full-time

FILE – The Amazon campus outside the company headquarters in Seattle is shown on March 20, 2020. (AP Photo/Elaine Thompson, File)

San Francisco, United States — Amazon is telling its thousands of corporate workers to return to the office five days a week, the company’s CEO Andy Jassy said in a staff memo on Monday.

Like many tech giants, Amazon had allowed workers to stay at home during the Covid-19 pandemic and has struggled to get them to come back into the office full-time.

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Amazon had already ordered a three-day office presence in February 2023.

“When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant,” Jassy told employees.

“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 said.

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