Amazon Joins Growing List Of Companies Requiring Employees Come Back To Office

Companies have been eager to get their employees back into offices for work as fears about the COVID-19 Pandemic have waned, despite its continued presence. Now, Amazon appears to be joining in when it comes to getting employees back inside its offices and ending some of their remote work benefits.

The move was announced in a memo by CEO Andy Jassy on Friday, where it was revealed that for various reasons, he and other senior executives felt it was in the best interest of the company for employees to return to work in the office the majority of the time.

"Ultimately, they've led us to conclude that we should go back to being in the office together the majority of the time (at least three days per week). We made this decision at a s-team meeting earlier this week, and for a number of reasons (including the adjustments I know will be required for some of our employees), I wanted to share with you as early as I could even though we haven't worked out all the execution details," the memo stated.

The memo further stated that the change would be effective beginning May 1, and a small number of employees would be exempt from the change if their roles already had exceptions prior to the pandemic.

The announcement is a shift from the company's previous policy, which allowed individual managers to decide how often they would require their employees to work from the office.

Amazon is far from the only company that had announced or instituted a similar move. Google and Apple have required at least a three-day-per-week in-office hybrid model since 2022, and Elon Musk made full-return requests at both Twitter and Tesla at the end of the year.

In January, under the leadership of reinstated CEO Bob Iger, Disney also called for employees to come back to the office, stating that by March 1, employees were expected to start returning to corporate offices at least 4 days a week.

The moves have been met with resistance from employees, who have largely enjoyed remote work since most companies enacted work-from-home policies at the onset of the Pandemic. However, with large numbers of Americans vaccinated and boosted, more available treatments, generally lower infection rates and far fewer hospitalizations and deaths, companies have largely felt that employees can and should return to their offices.

The news from Amazon comes not long after the Biden Administration also announced that the official public health emergency order for COVID would also come to an end for the country in May, meaning that free tests and vaccines, as well as other forms of aid and benefits from the pandemic, would expire.