Amazon demands staff return to the office five days per week – even as employees argue against current RTO measures

Amazon is demanding staff return to working in the office for five days a week beginning next year – though not all employees are happy about the shift away from working from home.

Andy Jassy, CEO at Amazon, broke the news via a letter to staff that was shared on the company’s website, saying “we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID.”

That includes a full RTO beginning in January 2025 as well as the end of hot desking, with staff generally set to be assigned desks again. Jassy added that the aim was to better organize the company to “invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other”.

The move comes as some companies continue to try to tempt workers back to offices after the shift to remote work during the pandemic. While some companies see benefits in a hybrid system’s mix of working from home and in the office, others have demanded a full return to office (RTO), including Dell — which has seen staff satisfaction fall in response.

At the moment, Amazon requires staff to be in the office three days a week, but Jassy argued that isn’t enough for brainstorming, collaborating, and learning. “If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits,” he said of the full RTO.

Despite this, Jassy admitted that there are many reasons people may not be in the office. These include personal reasons such as illnesses or caring responsibilities, as well as work motivations like being on the road to visit customers and partners or if “you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment”. That flexibility will continue, with approval from managers.

According to Reuters, a Q&A with staff after the letter was shared revealed that Amazon was also ending a program that allowed staff to work remotely from anywhere for four months a year.

Amazon employee rebellion

Not all staff welcomed the return to office, with some heading online and to social networks to express their frustration.

One report cited an Amazon staffer saying on Reddit they would “soft quit and get a new job”, while others said the move was more likely designed to drive staff to quit to avoid expensive layoffs.

In January, a senior AWS developer accused AWS of similar tactics, claiming the firm was purposefully worsening workplace conditions to encourage employees to quit. This practice is known as ‘quiet firing’.

After Amazon announced a three-day office mandate in 2023, workers launched a campaign to convince the company that working from home had benefits. Similar efforts are now underway to fight the full return to office, per The Seattle Times.

Employees could face a tough pushback from Amazon. Reuters reported that employees who failed to come into the office three days a week under the current mandate were told they were “voluntarily resigning”. Insider reports from Amazon have suggested that promotions are tied to employee RTO adherence at Amazon, with managers also holding the power to fire employees who don’t strictly follow the requirement.

Analysis of RTO mandates suggests they remain rare, with most companies favoring flexible working, and not always successful, with the rate of RTO mandates falling from 8% of companies last year to 3% this year.

Slashing manager jobs and red tape

Alongside the RTO mandate, Jassy also suggested the company wanted to slash the number of managers at Amazon, asking teams to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15%” by the end of the first quarter of next year.

“Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today,” Jassy wrote. “If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day.”

Jassy also said he’d set up a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” — just an email address that he promised to check — for staff to report “unnecessary process that’s crept in”. He added: “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup.”