Amazon Adjusts Remote Work Plan For More Flexibility

Seattle WA

11 October, 2021

2:52 PM

Description

SEATTLE — Washington's largest employer is making another shift in its evolving plans to return more workers to the office, announced Monday that team leaders would have the option to stay remote well beyond January. Amazon employs more than 80,000 people in Washington and has big expansion plans in Puget Sound, including a growing footprint in Bellevue. Amazon had previously set a target of Jan. 3 for office workers to resume in-person work at least three days a week. In a letter to employees shared Monday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said the company was rethinking its approach. "First, it's worth reminding ourselves how challenging and unprecedented these past 20 months have been," his letter begins. "We've never been through something like this before, and hope we never encounter it again." Jassy said Amazon leadership teams met several times to evaluate return-to-office plans and determined that a "one-size-fits-all" approach was unfeasible for a company of its size, especially amid a still-evolving pandemic. Under the latest plan, the heads of individual teams will make the call on whether to stay remote shift back to more office time. Jassy writes "For our corporate roles, instead of specifying that people work a baseline of three days a week in the office, we're going to leave this decision up to individual teams. This decision will be made team by team at the Director level. We expect that there will be teams that continue working mostly remotely, others that will work some combination of remotely and in the office, and still others that will decide customers are best served having the team work mostly in the office. We're intentionally not prescribing how many days or which days—this is for Directors to determine with their senior leaders and teams. The decisions should be guided by what will be most effective for our customers; and not surprisingly, we will all continue to be evaluated by how we deliver for customers, regardless of where the work is performed." Jassy most workers will need to stay close enough to their "core team" that they can make it to the office for a meeting within a day's notice, but recognized that many workers found remote work to be "inspiring and reenergizing." As a result, corporate workers will also have the choice to work up to a month per year "fully remote from any location within your country of employment," he said. Amazon instructed team leaders to share a plan with their workers by early January. As The Seattle Times reports, Amazon's prolonged absence is likely to have ripple effects for neighboring businesses, which rely on thousands of Amazon employees as customers.