Amazon Leaves It Up To Individual Teams to Solve the Remote Work Conundrum

This week, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote to the company’s corporate employees, apprising them of a flexible remote work policy that the company is adopting for the foreseeable future. Employees will have the option to work remotely provided their team directors allow it.

Amazon has changed its future course of action with respect to office reopening plans and has decided to indefinitely allow employees to work remotely. This is only months after the retail and cloud giant said it would need most employees back in offices for at least three days a week starting January 2021.

Clearly, the move is Amazon’s way of adapting to the uncertainty associated with the aftermath of the pandemic, which is now on track to be labeled an endemic provided there’s no spike in cases in the upcoming months. Additionally, the last one and a half years have been a defining period for organizations as well as professionals from all spheres of business, who have now adapted to working from home, or anywhere.

Amazon CEO since July 2021, Andy JassyOpens a new window addressed some of the concerns that employees might have from their possible apprehension to go back to working in offices. “First, none of us know the definitive answers to these questions, especially long term,” noted Jassy.

“Second, at a company of our size, there is no one-size-fits-all approach for how every team works best. And third, we’re going to be in a stage of experimenting, learning, and adjusting for a while as we emerge from this pandemic.”

See More: 5 Areas Global Talent Acquisition Strategy Should Focus On in the Remote Work Era

As a result, it won’t be mandatory for company employees to return to in-office work even after it begins to reopen in 2022. Of course, this is applicable to the nearly 50,000 corporate employees and not the total 1.3 million strong global employees involved in the retail delivery, fulfillment, and transportation unit.

Individual team directors will decide whether or not any of these ~50,000 employees need to work from Amazon’s office in the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, WA. Jassy mentions that decisions will be influenced by the needs of the customers.

“We expect that there will be teams that continue working mostly remotely, others that will work some combination of remotely and in the office, and still others that will decide customers are best served having the team work mostly in the office. We’re intentionally not prescribing how many days or which days—this is for directors to determine with their senior leaders and teams,” he adds.

One thing to note here is that even though Amazon employees will be working remotely for at least some or all of the time, they need to be accessible for a meeting within a day’s notice. This means working remotely in Amazon’s context necessarily means working from home, and not anywhere, say a different, far away city.

However, Amazon employees will have the option to avail up to four weeks in a year, to go fully remote from any location within the country of their employment.

Besides Amazon, Microsoft is the only company that has indefinitely postponed a full office reopening originally slated for October 2021. In September, the company even went on to sayOpens a new window that it has “decided against attempting to forecast a new date for a full reopening of our U.S. work sites.”

Other tech behemoths such as Google and Facebook will allow a segment of their employees to work remotely depending on multiple factors.

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