Amazon rethinks return to office, says remote working is fine!‍

Amazon has been going back & forth on its remote working stance through the entire year. At the very beginning, we saw Amazon announce that office-centric culture is their baseline and that they will have everyone come in office starting September, 2021.

This of course didn't go so well with employees. Not just Amazon, but employees worldwide voiced their opinions against full return to office.

In just a couple of months, Amazon announced hybrid working. But even that didn't pacify employees and now, Amazon has decided to keep the option of full remote working open.

Managers will get to decide whether their team wants to work hybrid, remote or in-office.

Here's a simple timeline of events:

Amazon's line managers to decide who comes in office and how often

Andy Jassy, Amazon's new CEO, has now delegated the decision of return to office to individual business leaders, who get to decide who comes in office and how often.

In his email to employees, Andy said

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. This decision will be made team by team at the director level.

”It's nice to see Amazon progressing towards providing more flexibility to employees. However, they are still non-committal to how this will actually execute in practice. This makes me think if the announcement is just to pacify employees or if the senior leadership actually sees value in remote working at scale.”