Amazon issued a return-to-office (RTO) mandate in September calling its company workers again to the workplace by January 2. Over a month has handed for the reason that mandate, and a few Amazon workers have but to see the workplace — as a result of Amazon cannot discover sufficient desks to carry its 350,000-person workforce.
In response to a Thursday report from The Wall Street Journal, Amazon has postponed RTO for employees assigned to dozens of U.S. places of work, together with New York Metropolis, Houston, and Atlanta, resulting from a scarcity of house. Amazon workers assigned to some places are nonetheless working remotely as they look ahead to additional directions about when they need to be within the workplace full-time.
The San Francisco Bay Space is very brief on house. Amazon has 18 places of work within the area, however it lacks desks for no less than 800 workers. In response final month, an inner group submitted a proposal to Amazon’s services division asking for a brand new workplace to open within the space. In response to the WSJ report, a spreadsheet supporting the proposal has drawn signatures from near 600 Amazon workers.
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An Amazon spokesperson informed the WSJ in an electronic mail that “the overwhelming majority” of company workers have desks and that solely “a comparatively small quantity” of Amazon’s “a whole lot of places of work” are “not fairly prepared” for absolutely in-person work.
Even in places of work with desk house, there have been logistics points with the RTO mandate, reminiscent of the place workers ought to park. Jeff Ferris, principal technologist at Amazon Net Companies Cloud, posted on X final month that when he tried to park his automobile within the workplace storage, he was turned away by safety.
“2,000 individuals, 900 parking areas,” he wrote.
Haha, confirmed up for #RTO (er, return to workplace, not the same old Restoration Time Goal in my life of labor) and bought turned away by safety on the storage. “2000 individuals, 900 parking areas,” she stated. ???
— Jeff Ferris (@trackzero) January 7, 2025
Some Amazon workers who’re again within the workplace report not having teammates who work from the identical location, difficult the aims of in-person work.
When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy first introduced the RTO coverage in September, he acknowledged that it will be “simpler for our teammates to be taught, mannequin, apply, and strengthen our tradition; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing [is] less complicated and simpler; instructing and studying from each other are extra seamless; and, groups are typically higher linked to at least one one other.”
He reiterated the message at a leaked all-hands assembly in November, telling workers that the RTO mandate was about “strengthening our tradition” and fostering collaboration.
Amazon workers have been working in-person no less than 3 days per week since May 2023. Different firms with five-day in-office insurance policies embody Salesforce and Walmart. Amazon laid off dozens of workers in its communications and sustainability departments final month.
