Amazon.com is instructing corporate staffers to spend at least three days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo last week. The decision marks a shift from Amazon’s previous policy, which left it up to individual managers to decide how often their employees would be required to work in the office. Jassy said he and the S-team, a group of senior executives from almost all areas of Amazon’s business, decided that employees should be in the office “the majority of the time (at least three days per week).” They made the decision after determining that it would benefit the company’s culture and workers’ ability to learn from and collaborate with one another.
Total Retail’s Take: How companies, including retailers, are handling the decision to have workers return to corporate offices, either on a full- or part-time basis, is a contentious topic. On the one side you have employers, who are pushing for employees to return to offices, citing the benefits to company culture, innovation and decision making that happen through in-person collaboration. For employees, who adjusted to working remotely during the pandemic, they value the work-life balance that working from home affords them, without a drop in productivity. Is a hybrid arrangement, with employees splitting their time between the office and working from home, the right approach? Time will tell, but for now we’re starting to see employers placing a renewed emphasis on having their employees together in person. How that shift, and specifically in Amazon’s case, impacts talent acquisition and retention remains to be seen.
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