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(GeekWire File Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Some Amazon workers won’t be back in the office five days a week when the company’s new RTO mandate goes into effect next month.
That’s because some offices across the country don’t have enough space to accommodate workers, according to reports from Business Insider and Bloomberg.
Offices in Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, New York, and Phoenix are affected, according to the reports. Some return dates are pushed back as much as four months.
In response to an inquiry from GeekWire, Amazon said buildings will be ready Jan. 2 for most employees, but some locations may have different timelines.
Amazon told its corporate workforce in September it was shifting from a 3-day-per-week mandate to 5 days. In a memo to employees, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said he wants his corporate workforce “to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID.”
Jassy said Amazon would bring back assigned desks, no longer using shared or agile workstations in offices where workers had dedicated desks prior to the pandemic.
Tech companies are employing a variety of RTO policies — some remain fully remote after the pandemic, while others such as Amazon are fully in the office.
An overwhelming majority of Amazon employees were not happy about the new mandate, according to a survey from Blind, the forum for anonymous/verified workers.
Most U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs prefer hybrid work, according to Gallup.
Amazon has more than 350,000 corporate employees.
In his September memo, Jassy said the company will “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025,” as part of his push to reduce overhead and get Amazon moving faster.
The company’s corporate headcount was “down slightly year-over-year,” according to Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky, speaking on a call with analysts following Amazon’s third quarter earnings release in October.
That’s a stark contrast to a five-year stretch between 2017 and 2022, when the company’s corporate headcount tripled, according to The Information.
Related: Bellevue real estate brokers bullish about Amazon’s new return-to-office policy as Microsoft moves out
