In the middle of last September, Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, announced that all company employees had to return to their offices starting in January 2025. However, beyond the anger of its employees, the company founded by Jeff Bezos has encountered an additional problem: his offices are not prepared to accommodate them all.
Amazon put an end to teleworking. The CEO of Amazon returned from his vacation with renewed energy, publishing a statement in which he announced the end of teleworking for all his employees and the return to the company’s offices five days a week. No exceptions, except for very specific cases that would be assessed individually.
The reason the executive argued was to promote the culture and values of teamwork that had led the company to its current position, and which he considered were being diluted.
“As we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the benefits of being together in the office are significant. I have previously explained these benefits, but in summary, we have found that it is easier for our teammates to learn, modeling, practicing and strengthening our culture; collaborating, exchanging ideas and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from each other is more fluid and teams tend to be better connected to each other,” the Amazon CEO said in his message; .
Some offices are not ready. The deadline given by Amazon for this return to the office was January 2, 2025. However, according to information published by Business Insiderthat date could even be postponed by several months in some cases since the offices are not ready to accommodate so many employees.
According to internal messages to which the American media has had access, the offices in Atlanta, Houston, Nashville and New York are the main ones affected by the delay, so the company has already informed the employees assigned to those locations that they can continue with their hybrid or remote shift as they have been doing until now.
It’s not the first time it happens. Although the call last September was general, Amazon has already made different calls to return to the office to specific departments, or has toughened its policy by increasing the hybrid day to three in-person days.
On that occasion, the company encountered the same problem: the offices that were supposed to accommodate those employees who had been forced to give up remote work did not have enough space for them, or the office infrastructure and its networks were not adapted. to support the use of so many users at the same time.
It is not an isolated case. The case of Amazon forcing its employees to return to offices that are not ready to welcome them is not exclusive to the company founded by Jeff Bezos. When Elon Musk threatened his Tesla and SpaceX employees to return to working a minimum of 40 hours from the office or quit, everyone rushed to Tesla’s offices in Fremont.
The problem is that Musk did not calculate that Tesla’s workforce had doubled during the pandemic, so when many of them returned to the offices they did not even have a table from which to work.
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Image | Flickr (Fortune Brainstorm TECH 2014), Unsplash (Joao paulo m ramos paulo)
