Amazon is ordering employees to go back to pre-Covid, in-office schedules

When 2025 arrives, Amazon will order its employees to go back to the before times with a five-day per week, in-office schedule, at assigned desks.

"We understand that some of our teammates may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments," CEO Andy Jassy said in a letter to employees Monday.

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Jassy's letter buries the lede, so to speak. After writing about his own personal Amazon story that began in 1997, he lays out an argument for two points: trimming back company bureaucracy and maintaining Amazon's company culture. Company culture is code for, "coming into the office five days per week."

For starters, Jassy said Amazon's growth has led to more managers, and that has led to what he calls "artifacts we'd like to change." This means issues such as having more layers and processes, and "pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings," which slows things down. In other words, it somewhat sounds like Amazon has a case of the "Ineffectual Middle Management Suck-Ups." The company wants senior leadership to fix this by the end of the first quarter in 2025.

Then Jassy gets to the point that will affect employees: requiring them to be in the office five days per week. Amazon will also assign desks to employees, just like before the pandemic sent most folks to remote work.

"We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID," Jassy wrote. "When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant. ... 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. 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."

What Amazon has also noticed over the past 15 months is "coffee badging." The company began a hybrid work schedule in May 2023 that required employees to be in the office three days per week. A group of employees protested the policy, partially arguing that it would increase Amazon's carbon footprint. By September, the company began monitoring when and how many times employees swiped their badges to enter an Amazon office building. This came after it was discovered that some employees were swiping their badge to enter a building, grabbing coffee, and then returning home to do their jobs. The practice has been dubbed "coffee badging." The issue is not unique to Amazon, and no official policy was implemented in response; however, The Seattle Times reported that the company began having talks with employees who weren't spending "meaningful amounts of time in the office.”

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Also around this time, Amazon instructed its workers to move closer to a corporate building, so they could work in office more, if they had moved further out when remote work was the norm. In response, some employees quit. Jassy also said that while employees could disagree with the three-day policy, they still had to commit to it. And if they could not do that, "it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.”

Now, Amazon is taking the next step and moving back to an in-office schedule, five days per week.

"Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week," Jassy wrote in his letter this week. "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. This was understood, and will be moving forward as well. But, before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward — our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances (like the ones mentioned above) or if you already have a Remote Work Exception approved through your s-team leader."