Amazon will let individual teams decide how much time they spend in the office

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business

Amazon is shifting its approach to remote work again, giving its workers more control over how much time they spend in the office and opening the door for more corporate workers to continue working from home.

The company will now allow individual teams to decide which policy works for them, ranging from a full-time return to office life to remaining mostly remote, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a note to employees on Monday.

“At a company of our size, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for how every team works best,” Jassy said. “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,” he added, referring to Amazon’s earlier policy of how often it would require employees to be present in person.

Company directors will decide what frequency of in-person work suits their teams, Jassy said.

“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,” Jassy said.

Amazon, like several other tech companies, has changed policies and return dates multiple times during the coronavirus pandemic. The company earlier pushed its office reopening date from September 2021 to January 2022 because of the Delta variant.

The company will still have certain requirements for how close employees need to be to the office, even if they are primarily remote.

“At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice,” Jassy said.

As with previous policies, the changes will apply only to Amazon’s corporate workforce and not to its hundreds of thousands of warehouse workers and delivery drivers, most of whom have been working in person throughout the pandemic. Jassy also noted there are workers in Amazon’s data centers and some physical stores who cannot work remotely.

In his note, he praised these teams and said their work is “highly appreciated.”

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