The Amazon headquarters sits virtually empty on March 10, 2020 in downtown Seattle, Washington. In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon recommended all employees in its Seattle office to work from home, leaving much of downtown nearly void of people.
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Amazon is instructing corporate staffers to spend at least three days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo on Friday.
It marks a shift from Amazon’s previous policy, which left it up to individual managers to decide how often their employees would be required to work from the office.
Jassy said he and the S-team, a tight-knit group of senior executives from almost all areas of Amazon’s business, decided at a meeting earlier this week that employees should be in the office “the majority of the time (at least three days per week).” They made the decision after determining that it would benefit the company’s culture and workers’ ability to learn from and collaborate with one another.
Amazon plans to implement the change on May 1. There will be some exceptions to the rule, Jassy said, such as customer support roles, which have the option of working remotely.
“It’s not simple to bring many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan,” Jassy said. “We know that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months (and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work.”