Starting 2025, Amazon (AMZN) employees will be required to return to the office five days a week, according to a note published yesterday (Sept. 16) by the company’s CEO Andy Jassy. “We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid,” said the executive, who listed stronger collaboration, mentorship and connection between teams as key incentives behind the decision.

The mandate was cited alongside a slew of other initiatives intended to bolster the company culture at Amazon, where Jassy—who became CEO in 2021—has worked for 27 years. “Keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time,” he said.

Like most tech companies, Amazon allowed remote work during the pandemic and last year introduced a three-day office mandate. Going forward, it will no longer be a given that employees can spend two days a week working remotely, as Amazon’s workforce will only be able to work from home under extenuating circumstances like illnesses and house emergencies. Locations that had assigned desks before Covid will also re-establish such arrangements, notably across Amazon’s U.S. headquarters in Puget Sound, Wash., and Arlington, Va.

Jassy also announced plans to streamline Amazon’s layers of managers. S-team organizers, a term referring to members of the company’s senior leadership team, will be asked to increase the ratio of individual workers to managers by 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2025. “Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today,” said the CEO. Jassy has also created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” to allow employees to warn of instances of “bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out,” he said, adding that he will read the emails himself and action them.

Jassy’s note is a reminder to Amazon “to operate like the world’s largest startup.” The executive’s comments echo those made earlier this year by Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google (GOOGL). While speaking at Stanford in April, he pointed towards Google’s remote work policy as a factor preventing it from dominating the A.I. arms race. “You’re not going to let people work from home and only come in one day a week if you want to compete against the other startups,” said Schmidt, who later walked back the statement and claimed he had misspoken about the work hours of Google, which currently mandates most employees to go into the office three days a week.

Tech has been slow to embrace RTO

Currently, only 33 percent of U.S. companies require employees to be in the office full-time, according to a survey conducted in the third quarter of 2024 by the software firm Flex Index. Within the tech industry, a staggering 96 percent of companies offer work location flexibility.

Microsoft (MSFT), for example, still allows its employees to work remotely up to 50 percent of the time, while Meta (META) currently requires workers to come into the office three days a week. Apple (AAPL), too, maintains a three-day weekly office policy—a stance the company’s CEO Tim Cook praised while talking to CBS News in 2022, where he noted that a return to in-person enables “the serendipity of running into people and bouncing ideas” but reiterated Apple’s commitment to allowing some remote days. “That doesn’t mean we’re going to be in here five days—if you were here on a Friday, it would be a ghost town,” said Cook.