Amazon offering teams more flexibility as we return to office

Subject: Updated guidance on where we work

Dear Amazonians,

I want to update you on how we’re continuing to evolve our thinking on where we work.

First, it’s worth reminding ourselves how challenging and unprecedented these past 20 months have been. We’ve never been through something like this before, and hope we never encounter it again. I’m appreciative and proud of how customer-focused and mission-driven the collective teams have been. It hasn’t been easy and not everything has gone perfectly, but the impact you’ve had on the lives of consumers, sellers, developers, enterprises, creators, and brands in helping them cope with this discontinuity has been remarkable.

As we start to think about the future, we’ve all been asking questions like, “When are we really going back to the office, what will that really be like, how will I allocate my time between the office and home, how will others do it, do we need to be working in person together every day to collaborate and invent best, and how do we build connections and culture best?” We’ve shared a couple of updates on this topic, first thinking we’d be back in the office in September 2021, and then by January 2022, with the suggestion that we should all try to be in the office at least three days a week. This guidance prompted questions, like, “Who decides which days, does the team need to be in the same days, are there certain functions or teams that can work more effectively at home vs the office (and vice versa),” and many more. We met several times as a leadership team to discuss these questions, and generally agreed on three things.

First, none of us know the definitive answers to these questions, especially long term. 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. All of this led us to change course a bit.

For our corporate roles, instead of specifying that people work a baseline of three days a week in the office, we’re going to leave this decision up to individual teams. This decision will be made team by team at the Director level. 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. The decisions should be guided by what will be most effective for our customers; and not surprisingly, we will all continue to be evaluated by how we deliver for customers, regardless of where the work is performed.

At this stage, we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice. We also know that many people have found the ability to work remotely from a different location for a few weeks at a time inspiring and reenergizing. We want to support this flexibility and will continue to offer those corporate employees, who can work effectively away from the office, the option to work up to four weeks per year fully remote from any location within your country of employment.

As almost all of you are hearing about this change for the first time, and will likely be eager to learn what your team’s plan is moving forward, I’d ask you to be patient with your leaders as it’ll likely take them a few weeks to develop and communicate their plan. We’re anticipating that you’ll hear from your leaders about these specific plans before January 3, which is the date we set previously for people to start returning to the office at least three days a week.

I also want to recognize our colleagues in Amazon’s fulfillment and transportation divisions whose roles aren't as flexible as most of our corporate roles. The work of these teams remains critical to communities around the world (and to the company's success), and the world has relied on them to deliver products to their doorsteps since the very beginning of the pandemic. There are other types of roles as well, such as those working in our AWS datacenters, physical stores, and those designing, developing, and testing new devices, who don’t have the flexibility to work remotely. I just want to thank these teammates for their passion, commitment, and continued dedication. It’s highly appreciated.

As mentioned earlier, these are unusual times and we’re all learning together what we believe is the best way to work together to make customers’ lives easier and better every day. And with it being so early in our mission, with lots of invention and change in front of us, you can bet that we will continue to adjust as we keep learning what makes most sense for our customers and teams.

Thank you for all your continued hard work.

-Andy