Amazon CEO Says Amazon's Office Employees Can Stay Home – For Now The company has shifted its stance on remote work in the past two years.
By Gabrielle Bienasz Edited by Jessica Thomas
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy could be embracing the hybrid life.
He said at the 2022 Code Conference Wednesday that (at least the corporate portion) of the company's 1.5-million-person workforce is not going to be required to go back to the office for the moment – setting Amazon apart from fellow tech giants Apple and Google, which have recently begun to hustle their employees back to IRL workspaces.
"We don't have a plan to require people to come back," Jassy said at the event Wednesday, per CNBC. "We don't right now. But we're going to proceed adaptively as we learn."
He added that many people who work for Amazon are in the office some days and that it varies by department, per the outlet.
But he did say at the event he thinks the approach has limitations. "I think it's a little harder to invent remotely," Jassy added.
Amazon employees who work in offices got sent home in March 2020, like many other corporate employees. But as CNBC notes, the company said in March 2021 that it hoped to get people back to the office in some capacity, per a memo sent to employees, then softened that stance in October.
When asked what seemed to shift his perspective, an Amazon spokesperson maintained this is similar to what the company said last October.
"We are still operating on a flexible working policy," the spokesperson told BIZ Experiences.
They added that the company does not plan to create one policy for the whole company as far as working in the office goes and plans to leave it up to each team, as Jassy outlined in his blog post in October.
Amazon exceeded earnings expectations in Q2, reporting $121.2 billion in net sales, a 7% increase from the same time last year.
Its in-person workforce has higher-than-typical rates of warehouse injury, one study found. The company's turnover rate for in-person workers is so high that it has worried about running out of U.S. workers, a New York Times investigation revealed.
