The Amazon Spheres, a part of the Amazon headquarters campus, right, within the South Lake Union neighborhood of Seattle, Washington, U.S., on Sunday, Oct. 24, 2021.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
A bunch of Amazon employees is urging CEO Andy Jassy to reconsider a latest return-to-office mandate.
On Friday, Jassy announced Amazon would require corporate staffers to spend no less than three days per week within the office starting May 1. Jassy said he and Amazon’s leadership team, often known as the S-team, decided it will be easier for workers to collaborate and invent together in person and that in-person work would strengthen the corporate’s culture.
The move marks a shift from Amazon’s pandemic-era policy, last updated in October 2021, which left it as much as managers to determine how steadily their teams needed to be within the office. Since then, there’s been a combination of fully distant and hybrid work amongst Amazon’s white-collar workforce.
Staffers on Friday created a Slack channel to advocate for distant work and share their concerns in regards to the latest return-to-work policy, in keeping with screenshots viewed by CNBC. Almost 14,000 employees had joined the Slack channel as of Tuesday morning.
The workers have also drafted a petition, addressed to Jassy and the S-team, that calls for leadership to drop the brand new policy, saying it “runs contrary” to Amazon’s positions on diversity and inclusion, inexpensive housing, sustainability, and deal with being the “Earth’s Best Employer.”
“We, the undersigned, call for Amazon to guard its role and standing as a world retail and tech leader by immediately cancelling the RTO policy and issuing a latest policy that enables employees to work remotely or more flexibly, in the event that they decide to accomplish that, as their team and job role permits,” in keeping with a draft of the petition, which was previously reported by Business Insider.
An Amazon spokesperson referred back to Jassy’s blog post about return-to-office guidance.
The workers also pointed to Jassy’s previous statements on return-to-office plans, through which he said there isn’t a “one-size-fits-all approach for a way every team works best” and extolled the advantages of distant work.
“Many employees trusted these statements and planned for a life where their employer would not force them to return to the office,” a draft of the petition states. “The RTO mandate shattered their trust in Amazon’s leaders.”
Employees who moved in the course of the pandemic or were hired for a distant role are concerned about how the brand new policy will affect them, in keeping with one worker, who asked to stay anonymous. Amazon’s head count ballooned during the last three years, and it hired more employees outside of its key tech hubs equivalent to Seattle, Recent York and Northern California because it embraced a more distributed workforce.
Amazon hasn’t addressed whether distant employees can be asked to relocate, beyond Jassy noting that there can be “a small minority” of exceptions to the brand new policy.
The petition cites internal data showing that a major share of employees prefer working fully distant with the choice of a monthly sync-up within the office, or prefer working within the office at most one to 2 days per week. It also points to research showing that distant work increases productivity and allows firms equivalent to Amazon to scale back expenses and attract and retain top talent.
It also notes that a return to mostly in-person work could affect employees’ work-life balance, and will particularly hurt parents, minorities, caregivers and other people with disabilities. Employees also questioned Amazon’s rationale behind forcing in-person work in all cases. As an example, some employees who’re part of worldwide teams will come into the office only to proceed having virtual meetings, and so they may not also have a coworker of their office, the petition says.
WATCH: Andy Jassy on the advantages of distant work