Amazon CEO Andy Jassy orders workers to return to the office 5 days a week

Starting in 2025, Amazon (AMZN) employees will be required to return to the office five days a week, according to a memo released yesterday (Sept. 16) by company CEO Andy Jassy. “We have decided that we will return to working in the office the way we did before the COVID-19 pandemic hit,” said the executive, who cited stronger collaboration, mentoring and team bonding as key drivers behind the decision.

The mandate was cited alongside a series of other initiatives aimed at strengthening the culture at Amazon, where Jassy — who became CEO in 2021 — worked for 27 years. “Maintaining a strong culture is not an inherited right. It’s something you have to work at all the time,” he said.

Like most tech companies, Amazon has allowed remote work during the pandemic, and last year introduced a three-day office mandate. Going forward, it will no longer be a given that employees can spend two days a week working remotely, as Amazon employees will only be allowed to work from home in exceptional circumstances, such as illness and emergencies at home. Locations that had assigned desks before Covid will also be reverting to such arrangements, most notably at Amazon’s U.S. headquarters in Puget Sound, Washington, and Arlington, Virginia.

Jassy also announced plans to streamline Amazon’s manager tiers. S-Team organizers, a term referring to members of the company’s senior management team, will be asked to increase the ratio of employees to managers by 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2025. “Fewer managers will remove tiers and flatten the organization more than it already is,” the CEO said. Jassy also created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” to allow employees to alert them to instances of “red tape or unnecessary processes that have crept in that we can root out,” he said, adding that he will read and act on emails himself.

Jassy’s memo is a reminder for Amazon “to operate like the biggest startup in the world.” The CEO’s comments echo those made earlier this year by former Google (GOOGL) CEO Eric Schmidt, who, during a speech at Stanford University in April, cited Google’s remote work policy as a factor preventing it from dominating the AI ​​arms race. “You’re not going to let people work from home and come in one day a week if you want to compete with other startups,” said Schmidt, who later walked back the statement and said he misspoke about Google’s work hours, which currently mandates that most employees come to the office three days a week.

Technology is slowly adopting RTO

Currently, only 33 percent of U.S. companies require employees to be in the office full time, according to a third-quarter 2024 study by software firm Flex Index. In the tech industry, a whopping 96 percent of companies offer work location flexibility.

Microsoft (MSFT), for example, continues to allow its employees to work remotely up to 50 percent of the time, while Meta (META) now requires employees to come into the office three days a week. Apple (AAPL) is also maintaining a three-day-a-week office policy — a stance that CEO Tim Cook praised during a 2022 interview with CBS News, where he noted that returning to in-person allows for “people to come together happily and exchange ideas,” but he reiterated Apple’s commitment to allowing some remote work days. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to be here five days — if we were here on Friday, it would be a ghost town,” Cook said.