Amazon updates return-to-office guidance

Update:
As we continue to closely watch local conditions related to COVID-19, we are adjusting our guidance for corporate employees in the U.S. and other countries where we had previously anticipated that employees would begin coming in regularly the week of Sept. 7. We are now extending this date to Jan. 3, 2022.

Our return-to-office timeline will vary globally in accordance with local conditions.

June 10:
Like all companies and organizations around the world, we’re managing every stage of this pandemic for the first time, learning and evolving as we go. We’ve been thinking about how to balance our desire to provide flexibility to work from home with our belief that we invent best for customers when we are together in the office.

With that in mind, we’ve adjusted our guidance on our plans for returning to the office and added more clarity. Going forward, we’ve decided to offer Amazon employees a mix of working between the office and home. Here’s the updated guidance for corporate roles where working away from the office is an effective option:

- If you would like to work in the office less than three days a week and are still able to commute into your assigned office as needed, you can apply for an exception from your VP. If the exception is approved, you will be considered primarily a remote worker, and will have an agile workspace (not a dedicated one) that provides space to collaborate with your team.

Separately, corporate employees (for whom working away from the office is an effective option) will have the choice to work up to four weeks per year fully remote from a domestic location (without the expectation that you will commute into an office during that time).

Our thinking is predicated on what we believe will be most beneficial for customers, while also trying to give employees more flexibility in their work environment and lives. For employees who were mostly remote pre-COVID, such as some Sales and Customer Service roles, they will remain working remote. For employees in roles which require onsite work, such as hardware engineers and frontline operations, these individuals will continue to work onsite. For roles where there are periods that being remote would be most effective (e.g. SDEs mostly coding where they don’t need to collaborate much with colleagues), we know that Amazonians will do the work from where it will yield the best result for customers. We look forward to more learning and listening with this updated guidance, and will continue to evolve as we do.

Finally, as we said earlier, we recognize this is an unprecedented time. We’re all figuring out how work will keep evolving and what will be best for customers, our teams, and individual employees. Amazonians have worked hard over the past 16 months, and helped so many customers and businesses cope with the unusual pandemic circumstances. We appreciate your hard work, commitment and invention on behalf of customers during this time, and appreciate your feedback and thoughts as we evolve our working culture and environments now and for the future.

Amazon updates return-to-office guidance

Amazon’s COVID-19 blog