Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent Monday's email to employees outlining changes in its work-from-home policies. The plan was for employees to return in January 2022. As per August, that meant workers would spend three days in the office and two remote days each week. Amazon's new policy, announced Monday, allows individual teams to decide how often they need to visit the office.
Jassys explains the new policies and their implementation.
Instead of requiring that employees work three days per week, we will leave this up to the individual teams. The Director will make this decision team-by-team. There will be some teams that work remotely, while others will work in the office. Customers will benefit more if the team works mostly in the office. We are not going to dictate how many or how many days this is. This is up to the Directors and their senior leaders. We should make decisions based on what is most efficient for our customers. And, not surprising, all of us will continue to be assessed based on how we deliver for customers regardless of where we work.
Jassy states that employees should expect to hear their team leaders about their plans by January 3rd. Jassy says that we want our employees to be close enough to their core teams to be able to travel to the office to attend meetings within days. Employees can also work remotely up to four weeks per annum, provided they live in the country they work.
These changes are only for office workers; all other employees including drivers, AWS employees, AWS datacenter workers, retail employees and employees who develop devices won't be able to have the same flexible schedules.
Amazon isn't the only company that has recently revised its plans to bring employees back to work due to uncertainty surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. Both Apple and Google extended their deadline for returning to work to January 2022 in August. Microsoft took it a step further in September by delaying the reopening of its office for an indefinite time.
