Beginning in May, Amazon will expect representatives to figure out of the workplace something like three days out of every week. The plan was made public by the business in a memo written by CEO Andy Jassy and published on Friday. Jassy claimed that a hybrid work arrangement would “strengthen” Amazon’s corporate culture and improve employee collaboration in support of the policy.
“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.”
Amazon stated that it expected employees to return to work in October 2020 shortly after the pandemic began. As successive waves of the coronavirus necessitated the lockdown of cities all over the world, the company continued to postpone that date multiple times. The announcement by Amazon comes in the same week that Activision announced that, beginning in July, Blizzard employees would be required to work from home at least three days per week. Similar to Blizzard, many Amazon employees have organized in response to the company’s policies. Most notably, JFK8, a Staten Island facility, was the first Amazon workhouse to be unionized after the majority of its employees voted to unionize last year. The move also comes after Amazon said that it would lay off more than 18,000 employees at the beginning of the year.
