Amazon is forcing its corporate employees to return to the office five days a week – and they’re not happy about it.
Staffers took to Slack to air their grievances after CEO Andy Jassy – who took the helm in 2021 – said in a note on Monday that employees have to return to full in-office work by January.
The return-to-office mandate is a sharp change from its current hybrid policy, which requires employees to work from the office at least three days a week.
“So if I go in 5x week, that means I can leave my laptop at work right? There’s no reason to bring it home,” one staffer fumed in an internal Slack channel seen by Business Insider, referencing Amazon’s intense work culture.
The five-day-a-week mandate is part of an effort to foster collaboration seen pre-pandemic, making it easier for teammates to “learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture,” Jassy said.
Jassy said the new mandate will operate like most office environments prior to the pandemic. It will be “understood” if an employee has an exceptional circumstance, like a child who is home sick, a house emergency or time spent on the road meeting with clients or partners.
Not all Amazon employees were swayed.
“Please do note that this is (in a lot of cases) significantly more strict and out of its mind than many teams operated under pre-covid,” one employee wrote on Slack, according to BI. “This is not ‘going back’ to how it was before. It’s just going backwards.”
The Slack channel was “burning” with frustrated comments and reactions after Jassy’s announcement on Monday, an Amazon employee told BI.
“Can I negotiate my manager to PIP me,” one Amazon employee wrote, referring to the company’s harsh performance improvement plan that employees have called a prerequisite to being fired.
“Take my money and leave?”
“What ever happened to ‘Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer,” another employee wrote on Slack, nodding to one of Amazon’s leadership principles.
Employees previously slammed the principle as a “marketing gimmick.”
Within the tech industry, Amazon has held a reputation as being a tough place to work for years – with past reports of long hours, unreasonably high standards and internal competition.
After the pandemic, the company required employees to return to the office three days a week.
That policy went into effect May 2023 – prompting employees to stage a walk-out.
And this new mandate has only reheated employees’ frustrations against the company – and its CEO in particular.
“It’s day 1169,” one employee wrote on Monday, referring to the number of days since Jassy took over as CEO.
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