Amazon employees will ‘work from office’ thrice a week

Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy announced the policy in a memo to employees on Friday. The new changes will be effective from May 1.

“I’m also optimistic that this change will provide a boost to the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarters locations in Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and dozens of cities around the world where our employees commute to office.” Jesse wrote.

The CEO said the company is yet to finalize the details of the policy. Jesse said he wanted to share the decision made at the company’s senior leadership team meeting this week as soon as possible.

The company said there will be some exceptions to the rule – customer support roles and salespeople will have the option to work remotely.

In October 2021, the Seattle-based company said it would let individual teams decide how many days a week corporate employees would be expected to work from the office.

Bringing back large numbers of employees could boost commercial districts around Amazon locations. Outside of ailing downtown Seattle, where Amazon is by far the largest employer, the company is a major office tenant in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Austin, Texas and other cities in the Los Angeles area.

Last month Amazon announced it would lay off 18,000 corporate positions in its efforts to reduce payrolls that had expanded rapidly during the pandemic lockdown.

Since the Covid pandemic has subsided globally, many companies have started calling their employees back to office.

In January this year, Starbucks asked its corporate employees to plan to work from the office three days a week. Disney is asking employees to plan for four-office days starting in March. While Walmart has said that its technical teams will need to plan regular office work days.

(with inputs from agencies)