Work from home scrapped for Amazon employees

The days of working from home are numbered as more high-profile tech companies demand that employees return to the office.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the way that we worked changed from coming into the office every day to exclusively working from home. Now, we’re seeing companies demanding that their employees return to the office.

The latest company to enforce this rule is tech giant Amazon, which released a statement from CEO Andy Jassy detailing Amazon’s plans to “further strengthen our culture and teams.”

From January 2025, Amazon employees are expected to return to the office five days a week.

The move from remote to in-office work has been slowly taking place over the past 15 months, as Amazon employees have been told to return to their desks for at least three days per week.

Although office-based work has been gradually re-introduced, extenuating circumstances still apply. For example, if an employee’s child is sick or a coder needs a few days to finish their work in an isolated environment.

However, this is not the case for everyone in the company as this 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 or if you already have a remote work exception approved,” Jassy said.

The move to almost exclusively work from the office environment has been initiated to improve collaboration and connection and “deliver the absolute best for customers and the business.”

The note from Jassy said that it had observed that it’s easier for the company’s employees to learn, model, practice, and strengthen Amazon’s culture if workers are back in the office.

“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,” said Jassy in the statement.