Amazon delays full-time return to office for some workers due to lack of space

[midian182]

In brief: One of the problems companies can face when forcing all of its workers back into the office – other than many of them leaving in protest – is a lack of space. Amazon, which has endured more issues related to its RTO mandate than most, is reportedly discovering it cannot accommodate everyone when they return five days a week in January, and is therefore allowing hybrid work to continue for several more months.

Like other companies, Amazon faced plenty of pushback from its corporate employees when it ended pandemic-era work-from-home arrangements, including a mass walkout.

But CEO Andy Jassy never relented. In August 2023, he warned employees that it's "not going to work out for you" if they didn't want to return to the office for at least three days a week.

Worse news came in September, when Jassy said that starting January 2, 2025, all employees have to be back in the office five days a week so the company could return to the way things were before the pandemic – though the policy is actually stricter than what was in place before 2020.

According to a new report from Business Insider, bringing back workers full-time en masse is proving to be a logistical challenge for Amazon. There are some locations unable to accommodate all the returning staff, meaning they get to continue working in a hybrid, three-days-a-week setup for longer.

Amazon Corporate Headquarters in Seattle

Amazon says it expects most of its locations to be ready by January, but employees in a few cities, including Houston, Nashville, and New York, have been notified that they can continue with their hybrid arrangements until the offices are prepared. The good news for these workers is that the RTO delays could extend as far as May.

Amazon has been in this exact position before. Many of its offices weren't ready to accommodate employees returning three days a week in 2023, leading to many still working from home full-time after the May deadline.

The situation isn't unique to Amazon. In 2022, Elon Musk told Tesla and SpaceX staff that they could either return to the office for a minimum of 40 hours per week or quit. So many Tesla workers rushed back to the Fremont plant that it caused a lack of desks, inadequate seating, overloaded WiFi, and not enough parking spaces. The shortages were still posing a problem months later.

Amazon, like others, claims being in the office drives innovation among staff and improves communication, though nearly all workers disagree, pointing to WFH benefits such as increased productivity, better mental health, and a good work/life balance.

Amazon is one of several companies to bring workers back to the office five days a week. Dell, Nothing, Boeing, UPS, JPMorgan Chase, and Goldman Sachs have also made their staff say goodbye to home comforts.

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Amazon delays full-time return to office for some workers due to lack of space

 

[VitalyT]

Some companies try to enforce back-to-office rules without any consideration for having no work space or parking available. Tesla was the most outrageous example.

 

[Endymio]

Tesla was the most outrageous example.

Most egregious? By no means ... most large sites had issues after what was, in many cases, a two-year hiatus from office use. Tesla was focused upon as Musk had just purchased Twitter, and exposed its illegal conspiracy with the FBI to accept tax dollars to censor true, but politically damaging stories.

 

[Freddie159]

Some companies try to enforce back-to-office rules without any consideration of having no works
space or parking available.

The problem is office space costs money so now the companies are spending money to bring someone in to work because they STILL can't find a way to ensure someone is working when you can't physically see them!! How many CEO's etc actually go down to a floor where people are working? And if they did what would they see? They would see dozens of people walking around from here to there, getting this out of that printer because this closer one can't print it the way they want it for a meeting, this person talking to that person getting advice on how to handle this or that problem. and dozens of people on the phone, about 1/4 of them for personal reasons!! Yet what does the CEO see....lots of busy people doing the same thing they would be doing from home except they contribute to the air pollution of every city every day because of someones failure to agree on how to monitor someone working from home!!

 

[scoffer]

Finally twigged that most of them were just sitting round the house in their pajamas...drinking coffee and jerking off to porn............

 

[ActualViking]

Finally twigged that most of them were just sitting round the house in their pajamas...drinking coffee and jerking off to porn............

If so then that only because Amazon is a crap employer to work for. Good work places has seen a boost in productivity and worker satisfaction from the work from home scheme.

Where I work we have been doing the work from home thing since before Covid. After the total work from home under Covid we now do 2 or 3 three days per week at the office and everyone is free to as they like, so much that it has been made sure there is office space for all. And everyone has been given a budget to sort out their home workspace, provided with the monitors they like and so on.