SEATTLE–As the debate over returning to workplaces vs. remote work continues, one of the nation’s largest employers has announced something of a compromise in its policy.
Amazon said it plans to give its workers more control over how much time they spend in the office while also 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 and reported by CNN Business.
"At a company of our size, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for how every team works best," Jassy wrote. "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.”
The latter reference was 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, CNN Business reported.
Certain Requirements in Place
"We expect that there will be teams that continue working mostly remotely, others that will work some combination of remote and in the office, and still others that will decide customers are best served having the team work mostly in the office," Jassy stated.
According to CNN Business, Amazon 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 wrote.
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, CNN Business stated, adding Jassy also noted there are workers in Amazon's data centers and some physical stores who cannot work remotely.