Amazon has issued new guidance on its return-to-work plans that indicates it doesn’t plan to ditch its offices anytime soon. The company has adjusted and updates Return to Office guidelines.
Last week, the company said in a Memo, “we’ve adjusted our guidance on our plans for returning to the office and added more clarity. Going forward, we’ve decided to offer Amazonians a mix of working between the office and home.”
Amazon said, “like all companies and organizations around the world, we’re managing every stage of this pandemic for the first time, learning and evolving as we go. We’ve been thinking about how to balance our desire to provide flexibility to work from home with our belief that we invent best for customers when we are together in the office.”
“With that in mind, we’ve adjusted our guidance on our plans for returning to the office and added more clarity. Going forward, we’ve decided to offer Amazon employees a mix of working between the office and home.” Amazon added.
Here’s the updated guidance for corporate roles where working away from the office is an effective option-
- Amazon said, Our new baseline will be three days a week in the office (with the specific days being determined by your leadership team), leaving you flexibility to work remotely up to two days a week.
- If you would like to work in the office less than three days a week and are still able to commute into your assigned office as needed, you can apply for an exception from your VP. If the exception is approved, you will be considered primarily a remote worker, and will have an agile workspace (not a dedicated one) that provides space to collaborate with your team.
- Separately, corporate employees (for whom working away from the office is an effective option) will have the choice to work up to four weeks per year fully remote from a domestic location (without the expectation that you will commute into an office during that time).
Amazon emphasized in Momo that our thinking is predicated on what we believe will be most beneficial for customers, while also trying to give employees more flexibility in their work environment and lives.
For employees who were mostly remote pre-COVID, such as some Sales and Customer Service roles, they will remain working remote. For employees in roles that require onsite work, such as hardware engineers and frontline operations, these individuals will continue to work onsite, Amazon said in Memo.
For roles where there are periods that being remote would be most effective (e.g. SDEs mostly coding where they don’t need to collaborate much with colleagues), we know that Amazonians will do the work from where it will yield the best result for customers., It added.
Amazon looks forward to more learning and listening with this updated guidance, and will continue to evolve as we do.
The company had said earlier, “We recognize this is an unprecedented time. We’re all figuring out how work will keep evolving and what will be best for customers, our teams, and individual employees.”
Amazonians have worked hard over the past 16 months and helped so many customers and businesses cope with the unusual pandemic circumstances, The company added.
We appreciate your hard work, commitment, and invention on behalf of customers during this time, and appreciate your feedback and thoughts as we evolve our working culture and environments now and for the future, Amazon said.
