Amazon Has No Plans To Make Staff Return To Office

BYOD Becomes WFHD

Return to office. CEO Andy Jassy says Amazon will not force corporate staff back into the office anytime soon

Amazon is not following others in the technology industry by ordering its corporate staff to return to the office, in a post Coronavirus world.

That is according to CEO Andy Jassy, who said Amazon isn’t looking to force the company’s workers back into the office anytime soon.

Some tech firms are struggling to get workers to return to the office. Last month Netherlands-based workspace management specialist infinitSpace reported that a majority of business leaders are struggling to get staff to return to the office.

Office return

Indeed, many big name tech firms including Apple, Google and others, have faced significant pushback from their workforce as they sought to bring staff back into the office.

Indeed, one Apple executive publicly resigned over the firm’s order to return to the office earlier this year.

Many firms meanwhile are adopting hybrid working practices, with staff working two or three days in the office, and other days remotely (often at home).

But Amazon is not going to push the matter.

“We don’t have a plan to require people to come back,” Jassy was quoted by CNN as saying at the Code Conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. “But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.”

Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy. Image credit: Amazon
Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy. Image credit: Amazon

Relaxed approach

In August 2021 Amazon delayed its staff to return to the corporate office or campus until 2022, due to surge in Covid-19 cases in the US at the time from the Delta variant.

Then last October Amazon said it would let individual managers and teams determine how much time they spend in the office, with Jassy saying at the time that “there is no one-size-fits all approach for how every team works best.”

And it seems as though that attitude will continue going forward.

It should be noted that this relaxed approach only applies to Amazon’s corporate staff, and not its warehouse workers or drivers, whose jobs do not allow them to work from home.