Amazon orders workers to return to the office five days a week

Amazon wants to set its corporate clock back to before the pandemic. After four years of employees with the online retailer working from home, CEO Andrew Jassy said on Monday he wants all workers back in the office five days a week.

To foster a culture of collaboration, "we've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID," Jassy said in a memo to employees posted on Amazon's website. "When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."

Jassy also said teams function better when people work together in person, while the company's corporate culture is strengthened. The new mandate goes into effect Jan. 2, 2025. 

In February 2023, Amazon asked all employees to come back to the office for three mandatory days, resulting in some protests from workers.

Jassy acknowledged that before the pandemic, when full-time in-office work was the norm, remote work exceptions were made for employees who had extenuating circumstances. Such leniency will continue.

"If you or your child were sick, if you had some sort of house emergency, if you were on the road seeing customers or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely," he wrote in the memo. 

Some labor experts have said that enterprises abolishing remote work could lead to employee churn, noting that since the pandemic many employees have come to depend on the flexibility afforded by working from home at least part of the time. On LinkedIn, meanwhile, economic historian Dror Poleg speculated that Amazon's new policy is designed to drive some employees to leave the company.

"Companies are using return-to-office mandates when they want to cut headcount," he said. "So the easiest way to fire employees is to force them back to the office."

At least some Amazon workers seem dismayed by the summons to return to the office, expressing unhappiness in an internal messaging channel, according to The New York Times. "The whole situation is just very depressing and de-motivating to say the least," one message read, the newspaper reported.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.