Some Amazon Workers Won’t Be Returning to the Office 5 Days a Week in January
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced in September that the company’s corporate employees would be required to return to the office five days a week starting January 2. However, several groups of employees were recently notified by the real estate team that their workspaces may not be ready until as late as May.
The affected employees are located in Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, and New York. This news follows a similar situation in 2023, where Amazon required employees to badge in three days a week, but some locations were unable to accommodate this schedule until the summer or as late as September.
Amazon’s transition to a five-day workweek has sparked concerns about whether this will lead to a quitting spree or prompt other companies to follow suit. Amazon’s cloud boss Matt Garman believes that unhappy employees may leave the company, while CEO Andy Jassy has denied that the five-day mandate is a “backdoor layoff.”
Despite this, Jassy has reported that the company has seen improvements in team collaboration, communication, and overall culture since the hybrid return to the office. “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 wrote in a memo.
