According to a message from CEO Andy Jassy on Friday, thousands of Amazon employees have been ordered to return to the office for at least three days every week.
This change, effective May 1st, will eliminate Amazon’s (AMZN) remote/hybrid friendly policy. This news follows a month in which Amazon (AMZN) said it would be laying off over 18,000 employees due to economic concerns.
Jassy defended the policy shift by arguing that more face-to-face interaction will improve teamwork and morale.
We’re going to give the teams who need to perform that job some time to build a strategy because “it’s not straightforward to bring many thousands of people back to our offices across the globe,” Jassy said in the message. “We realise that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will slowly improve over the next months (and years) as our real estate and facilities teams iron out the kinks and continuously developing how we want our offices to be set up to reflect the new ways we want to work.”
Jassy said that Amazon’s “urban headquarter sites in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities across the globe where our workers travel to the office” would benefit from the in-person requirements.