The Amazon headquarters sits nearly empty on March 10, 2020 in downtown Seattle, Washington. In response to the coronavirus outbreak, Amazon really helpful all employees in its Seattle office to work at home, leaving a lot of downtown practically void of individuals.
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Amazon is instructing company staffers to spend at least three days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo on Friday.
It marks a shift from Amazon’s previous policy, which left it up to particular person managers to determine how usually their employees would be required to work from the office.
Jassy mentioned he and the S-team, a tight-knit group of senior executives from virtually all areas of Amazon’s enterprise, determined at a assembly earlier this week that employees ought to be in the office “the majority of the time (at least three days per week).” They made the resolution after figuring out that it will profit the firm’s tradition and staff’ capacity to study from and collaborate with each other.
Amazon plans to implement the change on May 1. There will be some exceptions to the rule, Jassy mentioned, similar to buyer help roles, which have the choice of working remotely.
“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 mentioned. “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.”
Other firms have not too long ago known as their employees again to the office both full time or a number of days a week as the Covid-19 pandemic has eased. Google and Apple have required a few of their employees to return to the office since final yr, whereas Disney in January began requiring hybrid employees to be in the office 4 days a week.
Amazon is pushing for its employees to be in the office extra regularly as it’s present process a interval of belt tightening amid slowing gross sales and a worsening financial outlook. Amazon initiated the largest layoffs in its historical past, affecting about 18,000 folks, together with a company hiring freeze. It has additionally axed some experimental tasks.
Jassy mentioned one in all the advantages of being again in the office is that employees may have extra alternatives to workshop concepts and innovate.
“A lesser-known fact is that some of the best inventions have had their breakthrough moments from people staying behind in a meeting and working through ideas on a whiteboard, or walking back to an office together on the way back from the meeting, or just popping by a teammate’s office later that day with another thought,” he added.
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