Amazon has no plan to make workers return to the office, CEO Andy Jassy says

By Rishi Iyengar, CNN Business

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy isn’t looking to force the company’s workers back into the office anytime soon.

“We don’t have a plan to require people to come back,” Jassy said at the Code Conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. “But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.”

The online retail giant announced last October that it would let individual managers and teams determine how much time they spend in the office, with Jassy saying at the time that “there is no one-size-fits all approach for how every team works best.” And it appears that attitude will continue for the foreseeable future.

Jassy’s stance may serve as a marker to the tech and corporate world, as companies look beyond the summer and intensify their efforts to bring workers back to the office.

According to a recent survey from business consulting firm Gartner, 69% of mid- to large-sized employers say they require employees with jobs that can be done remotely to be at work a set number of days.

Google started requiring its employees to spend three days a week in the office from April this year, while Apple’s plan to institute a similar requirement faced pushback from employees (the plan was later shelved amid a rise in Covid cases near the company’s Bay Area headquarters).

While the flexible policy applies to Amazon’s corporate workers, the company also has thousands of delivery drivers and warehouse employees whose jobs do not allow them to work from home. Notably, a number of those are attempting to unionize in a quest for better working conditions.

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