Several prominent business leaders, such as JP Morgan’s Jamie Dimon, have openly criticized remote work, advocating for employees to return to the office full-time.
Amazon has stirred up a lot of debate by ending remote work for its corporate employees, impacting hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. This move has caused major dissatisfaction, especially at Amazon’s headquarters in Seattle.
Last year, when Amazon tightened its remote work policies, employees protested. The protest organizer was fired, leading to claims of unfair treatment. Labor officials are now looking into this, according to BBC reports.
In a message to employees, CEO Andy Jassy said he was worried that Amazon’s once energetic start-up culture was fading because of flexible work and too much bureaucracy. To fix this, Jassy introduced a “bureaucracy mailbox” for reporting unnecessary rules and asked managers to reorganize teams so they manage more people. This could lead to job cuts, which will be announced within teams.
Besides bringing employees back to the office, Amazon is also reintroducing “assigned desk arrangements” at its locations, including its US headquarters. Jassy added that remote work would still be allowed in special cases, like taking care of a sick child or dealing with emergencies, but generally, employees are expected to work in the office.
During the pandemic, remote work was common across many industries. As companies started calling employees back to the office in 2022, the process has been uneven. Research by economists shows that by this summer, only 12% of full-time employees in the US were fully remote, while 27% had hybrid work setups.
Prominent business leaders, including Jamie Dimon of JP Morgan, have criticized remote work and pushed for employees to return to the office full-time. This trend is also seen in other companies like UPS and Dell, which are also bringing staff back to the office this year.
While Jassy believes that Amazon’s experience with hybrid work has confirmed the benefits of being in the office, Stanford Professor Nicholas Bloom notes that this might not be a wider trend. He points out that while some companies are ending remote work, others are expanding it, though these changes often don’t make the news.
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