Amazon workers have until January before they’ll be expected in corporate offices five days a week, but some aren’t expecting to stick around that long.
In a recent survey of 2,585 Amazon employees on anonymous job review site Blind, 73% said they are considering looking for a new job following CEO Andy Jassy’s recent memo announcing a full-time return-to-office. Conversations on Blind tend to be critical of employers.
Further, 80% of the Amazon professionals polled reported that they know of a colleague considering looking for another job because of the announcement.
These Amazon workers also wrote about how the policy announcement has been a blow to morale, and that the change could disproportionately impact parents and caregivers who benefit from remote and hybrid flexibility.
Another survey from Glassdoor finds that 74% of Amazon workers are “rethinking” the future of their careers, whether at the tech giant or elsewhere.
Experts say strict office attendance policies may be a way to get people to quit and avoid the cost of laying them off.
But plenty of Amazon employees are hoping leadership will reconsider the policy, which requires corporate workers to report to offices five days per week, up from the current three, beginning in 2025.
Amazon workers are “strongly dissatisfied” with the policy change, according to an anonymous survey created by employees, reported by Fortune. The survey was shared on company Slack channels, including a “remote advocacy” group with more than 30,000 members, whose support of flexible work could skew the findings.
The creators of the survey said they intend to aggregate and share the survey findings with Jassy and other leaders “to provide them with clear insight into the impact of this policy on employees, including the challenges identified and proposed solutions,” Fortune reports.
Notably, a group of Amazon employees sent a six-page memo expressing concern to leaders in February 2023 when the company announced a return to office three days a week, but it was dismissed.
Jassy reported seeing teamwide improvements as a result of the company’s hybrid return in his memo announcing the new five-day requirement: “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” he wrote.
“If anything,” he continued, “the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”
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