Amazon has no plans to bring workers back to the office, says CEO Andy Jassy

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

“We have no plan to require people to come back,” Jassy said at the code conference in Los Angeles on Wednesday. “But we’re going to continue adaptively as we learn.”

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

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

According to a recent survey by business consulting firm Gartner, 69% of medium and large employers say they require employees with jobs that can be performed remotely to be at work for a certain number of days.

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

While the flexible policy applies to Amazon’s ( AMZN ) corporate workers, the company also has thousands of delivery drivers and warehouse workers whose jobs don’t allow them to work from home. In particular, there are a number of these who are trying to organize themselves in a search for better working conditions.