Amazon Delays Return-to-Office Mandate in Several Cities for Lack of Office Space

Amazon will delay a requirement that all employees work from the office in at least seven major cities, according to a new report from Bloomberg. The reason? The online retail giant just doesn’t have enough office space for their employees to work.

Amazon first announced in September that corporate employees would soon need to work from the office five days a week, something that has roiled workers who have found many companies offering more flexible work-from-home arrangements since the start of the covid-19 pandemic in 2020. The start of this new return-to-office mandate was supposed to be the start of the new year.

But workers in at least seven cities have been told they won’t need to come into the office that frequently until more office space is found, according to Bloomberg. The cities include Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, New York, and Phoenix, and it’s not clear how many of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees globally will be impacted, though Amazon told Bloomberg the “vast majority” of workers will return to the office on Jan. 2.

Why does Amazon want workers to return to the office? When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the move in a blog post on Sept. 16, he tossed out a slew of buzzwords that don’t actually mean anything and were incredibly confusing. One sentence that sticks out was filled with so many commas and semicolons you’d be hard-pressed to find any succinct meaning in it at all:

I’ve previously explained these benefits (February 2023 post), but in summary, 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.

Okay.

What’s the real reason Amazon would be doing this? There are two dominant theories. The first is that commercial real estate has suffered since the onset of the covid pandemic and artificially propping up real estate values helps the ruling class. It’s funny, of course, that Amazon is struggling to find enough office space in this scenario.

The second theory is that Amazon wants to do layoffs but instead is opting to make things harder for employees as a way to get workers to quit on their own. When you lay corporate workers off it’s often necessary to provide severance, but if someone quits on their own, the company doesn’t need to deal with those extra costs. This strategy isn’t new but does seem to encourage the most sought-after employees to leave since they can find work at competing companies.

In fact, a recent study found that companies that had the most strict return-to-office mandates had higher turnover rates and were losing their most senior and skilled employees. Female employees had a turnover rate three times higher than men, likely as a result of women bearing a higher burden for childcare and domestic responsibilities in the U.S.

When Amazon finally finds enough office space to house all its employees, workers will still be confronted with the fact that modern office design is garbage. American businesses have built communal working spaces where people work individually and enclosed rooms that can be rented for big meetings that would be ideal for individuals. That creates unnecessary conflict in the office.

From Bloomberg:

Some workers say the company is still struggling to host people three days a week. In recent interviews, employees complained of working from shared desks, crowded corporate canteens and a lack of conference rooms for confidential calls or team meetings. The company has added a feature to its room reservation tool that requires workers to attest they actually plan to use the space, an apparent effort to crack down on squatters looking for a quiet place to work.

But what are you going to do? Work from home and actually get some work done? That’s not going to keep those commercial real estate prices up, is it?