Amazon CEO Tells Employees They’ll Need to Be in the Office Five Days a Week: ‘We Want to Operate Like the World’s Largest Startup’

Amazon is going fully back to the office.

Andy Jassy, the technology giant’s CEO, informed employees that starting next year, they will be expected to report to the office five days per week — as they generally did before the start of the COVID pandemic in 2020. That’s so that Amazon will be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business,” he wrote Monday in a companywide memo, which Amazon shared publicly.

Amazon’s senior management team (the “s-team” in company jargon) has “decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” Jassy said.

“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote, and among other things that entails “deeply connected collaboration” in which employees “need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems.”

Previously, as part of its return-to-work policies after the pandemic subsided, starting in May 2023 Amazon required employees to be in the office at least three days a week. According to Jassy, “we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.”

Amazon employees will be expected in the office five days a week starting Jan. 2, 2025.

“Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week,” Jassy said, noting exceptions such as someone needing to care for a sick child or employees traveling for work. “But, before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward — our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances” (or if they have an approved “remote work exception” through their manager).

Jassy assumed the role of Amazon’s CEO in July 2021, taking over for founder Jeff Bezos, who is now executive chairman. Jassy, after joining the company in 1997, started the Amazon Web Services group and led it for nearly 20 years.

In his 1,400-word memo Monday, Jassy also said that to achieve greater efficiencies and speed decision-making, the company is asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. “Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today,” the CEO wrote.

Jassy noted that he was encouraged by the continued growth of businesses including Amazon’s advertising group and that “Prime Video continues to expand.” In April, Jassy announced that Prime Video had surpassed 200 million monthly viewers. For the second quarter of 2024, the company’s ad revenue increased 20%, to $12.77 billion, although that was short of analyst expectations.