Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced Monday that starting in January, employees of the e-commerce giant will generally be expected to return to the office five days a week, going back to “the way we were before the onset of Covid.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy speaks at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit in 2022. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
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But among large company tech CEOs, he won’t have much company.
Data from Flex Index, a database of flexible work policies, finds that just 7% of large technology firms—those with at least 1,000 workers—require full-time office attendance, and that figure has been mostly going in the other direction—declining over the past year and a half. While the measure ticked up slightly from 5% in the second quarter of 2024, it had been steadily dropping each quarter before that, falling from 13% of large tech firms that mandated daily office attendance at the start of last year.
“Amazon is by far the largest tech company to have a full-time, in-office policy,” says Rob Sadow, founder and CEO of Scoop Technologies, a hybrid work management software firm that has collected and published the remote work policies of more than 6,362 U.S. companies, including 417 large technology firms. Amazon’s announcement, Sadow says, is “seismic.”
He points to relatively few other large tech or tech-adjacent firms that have full-time in-office policies, such as Tesla and NCR, noting that most large technology firms, such as Apple or Meta, require two to three days a week in the office, as Amazon does now. Among large companies, Sadow says, no other industry has a smaller percentage of companies with full-time office policies than tech, making Amazon’s new mandate stand out even more among a small group of peers. (Across all U.S. companies, 33% require full-time office work, according to Flex Work’s data. Amazon declined to comment beyond Jassy’s memo.)
“You’re going to see a whole revisiting of this conversation again” about remote work mandates, Sadow says, after a relatively quiet back-to-office push following Labor Day this year, a milestone that in past years has been an opportunity to boost onsite requirements. The move could prompt other companies to “raise the question of what Amazon is seeing and whether that means we need to do anything differently,” Sadow says, even if they don’t ultimately make changes.
Jassy’s announcement came as part of a broader memo aimed at targeting bureaucracy, cutting management layers and making changes at the company to “further strengthen our culture and teams,” he wrote. To speed decision-making and cut unneeded meetings, Jassy said Amazon would ask each senior executive’s unit to boost the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by early next year, which would likely reduce the number of managers.
After 15 months of being in the office three days a week, Jassy also said the five-day policy would help Amazon’s culture. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture,” he wrote, noting that there would be exceptions such as illness, visiting customers, or needing “a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment”—the types of reasons people could work from home before the pandemic. Assigned desks for each worker, he noted, will return, too.
Brian Elliott, a former senior vice president at Slack and executive director of its Future Forum research coalition, says much research has shown that hybrid workers actually have higher levels of engagement than any other group, a measure some equate to company culture.
But while Elliott says Amazon’s move could “give license to those executives who already are predisposed to anxiety” around remote work, many others recognize Amazon is known for its intense culture and may not jump to copy the move.
A discussion about improving culture doesn’t always refer to how satisfied or engaged people are at work, Elliott notes. When some executives talk about culture, it’s a reference to “your level of dedication to our endeavor—and how hard are you willing to put your nose to the grindstone.”
