Amazon To Require 5 Days In The Office

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has misty watercolor memories of prepandemic office culture.

In a company memo and blog post Monday, Jassy wrote that the company will begin 2025 with a mandate for the majority of employees to be in the office five days per week.

“We've decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” Jassy wrote. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

Jassy said the new office policy, which officially takes effect Jan. 2, is an extension of the company's February 2023 requirement that employees come in three days per week. 

Amazon’s leased office footprint was roughly 29.6M SF in North America at the end of 2023, according to its most recent annual report. The company owns another 9.2M SF in North America, according to the filing. The e-commerce giant employed 1.5 million people as of December 2023.

In March, Business Insider reported that Amazon planned to cut its office footprint over a three- to five-year period, letting leases expire and negotiating early terminations with the goal of reducing its office vacancy rate from 33.8% to 10%.

An Amazon spokesperson declined to confirm its office footprint or employee count when reached by Bisnow Monday. 

Jassy said the company will reestablish assigned desks in some locations, including its dual headquarters in Seattle and Arlington, Virginia. He also wrote that the company will reduce layers of management by the end of the first quarter of next year. 

Large companies have issued return-to-office mandates over the last two to three years with varying levels of success. Many employers struggled with the enforcement aspect of their policies, but some have cracked down on employees still working remotely when they’re supposed to be in the office.

Goldman Sachs was one of the leaders of the five-day return, requiring full-time office attendance beginning in 2023.

But apart from the country’s biggest firms, the calls for returning to the office have at least partially waned as the new normal has become cemented in the wake of the pandemic.

In a study conducted this year by Zoom, about two-thirds of respondents said their workplaces were using a hybrid model. The same percentage of respondents to a CBRE survey said their companies were at a steady rate of office utilization.