Amazon to employees: In-person, 5-day work week begins next year

Amazon will start expecting many employees to work in-person five days a week next year.

CEO Andy Jassy on Monday told Amazon employees the tech giant was “going to return to being in the office in the way we were before the onset of COVID” effective Jan. 2, with the expectation that people “will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances… or if you already have a Remote Work Exception approved through your s-team leader.”

It represents the latest update to Amazon’s rules around in-person and remote work. The tech giant had previously transitioned from remote work to a mandated three days in office in May of last year and implemented some other changes.

Jassy linked the new five-day requirement to Amazon’s effort to be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business,” according to his message.

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He also pointed to “significant” advantages related to culture, engagement, collaboration and training that he and Amazon believe in-person work provides.

Still, the tech giant’s CEO acknowledged that Amazon staffers could work virtually when they had things like illnesses and business travel pre-COVID and said such circumstances will be understood “moving forward as well.”

The company maintains numerous offices, including headquarters in Seattle, Washington, and Arlington, Virginia, and corporate sites in dozens of other places around the world.

“We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements in locations that were previously organized that way, including the U.S. headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington),” Jassy told employees on Monday. “For locations that had agile desk arrangements before the pandemic, including much of Europe, we will continue to operate that way.”

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At the same time, Jassy announced the company would adjust its organization structure.

Amazon has told every “s-team organization” to have a 15% larger proportion of “individual contributors” compared to managers by the end of 2025’s first quarter, according to his message.

The goal of reducing management layers is to promote more ownership among workers and speed up decision-making within the company’s culture, he told employees.