Amazon Employees Must Work in Office 5 Days a Week, CEO Says

Amazon (AMZN)’s office workers must return to their desks five days a week starting in 2025, CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday.

It’s a departure from the tech giant’s post-pandemic policy, which entrusted individual team managers to make the call on whether employees needed to return to the office or could work remotely. That changed last year, when Jassy announced staff should head into work at least three days per week.

Now, starting on Jan. 2, Amazon’s corporate staffers will be expected to work in-office five days per week, unless there are “extenuating circumstances” or exceptions approved by team leaders, Jassy wrote in a letter to employees.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID-19,” Jassy said. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

Amazon’s move is one of the strictest return-to-work policies from a big tech company, many of which have embraced remote work in the wake of the pandemic and have been shedding office space in the process.

Jassy also announced Monday that each senior leadership team within Amazon must increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2025, meaning the company’s number of managers may be reduced significantly. It’s unclear whether positions will be cut.

“With a company of our size and complexity, the work won’t be trivial and it will test our collective ability to invent and simplify when it comes to how we organize and go after the meaningful opportunities we have across all of our businesses,” Jassy said.

Jassy, who was appointed CEO by Jeff Bezos in 2021, has been known to prioritize cost cutting across Amazon. In January 2023, Jassy announced that 18,000 workers would be laid off, and in March, he said an additional 9,000 employees would lose their jobs.

In the second quarter of 2024, Amazon’s total headcount of employees was 1.53 million — up only 5 percent from the same time last year, according to the company’s second-quarter earnings release.

Jassy said the changes announced Monday are intended to “strengthen our culture” and better connect Amazon’s teams. The announcement also said Amazon would “bring back assigned desk arrangements” in places where that used to be the norm, particularly the Seattle area and Arlington, Va.

It remains to be seen how well Amazon’s offices will hold all of its employees once again, especially after the tech and e-commerce giant said in March that it had plans to save $1.3 billion by significantly reducing its office space and ending leases early, as Commercial Observer previously reported.

Isabelle Durso can be reached at idurso@commercialobserver.com.