Amazon tells staff to get back to office five days a week

Amazon is ordering staff back to the office five days a week as it ends its hybrid work policy.

The change will come into force from January, Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid,” he said, adding that it would help staff be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other”.

Mr Jassy has long been known as a sceptic of remote work, but Amazon staff were previously allowed to work from home two days a week.

Amazon’s push to get corporate staff back into the office has been a source of tension within the firm which employs more than 1.5 million people globally in full-time and part-time roles.

Staff at its Seattle headquarters staged a protest last year as the company tightened the full remote work allowance that was put in place during the pandemic.

Amazon subsequently fired the organiser of the protest, prompting claims of unfair retaliation, a dispute that has been taken up with labour officials.

In his message on Monday, Mr Jassy said he was worried that Amazon – which has long prided itself on preserving the intensity of a start-up while growing to become a tech giant – was seeing its corporate culture diluted by flexible work and too many bureaucratic layers.