Behind the scenes of Amazon’s requirement to return all employees to the office

The shortage of space has led the e -commerce giant to postpone the guidance with dozens of offices across the United States, including Houston, Atlanta and New York. Full -time employees still wait for a message when they can actually come to the office.

Others, who have already returned to work in the office five days a week, discover that their team members were sent to work elsewhere. They find themselves competing for a parking space, a place to sit in and on private rooms for video calls.

“Don’t want to come back? Look for a different job”

Amazon was one of the most prominent voices they called on employees to return to the office. She has admitted the world of shock in September with her declaration that 350,000 company employees will have to return to the office for five days a week starting from January 2025.

Everyone’s presence in the offices was critical because “creativity, collaboration and brainstorming are simpler and more effective,” said CEO Andy Jesse for employees. Amazon recruited many employees during the plague when the work was remotely, and if employees leave because they do not want to go For the office, that’s fine for the company.

“If it is not right for you, no problem. You can go and find another company if you want,” said Amazon Web Sarvie, Matt German, at Wall Street Journal’s event in October. “But for us, we decided it The best way to operate our company. “However,

“2,000 people, 900 parking spaces”

Implementing this policy at his huge employer dozens of offices in various locations encountered malfunctions.

A group of workers in the San Francisco Bay area, where Amazon has 18 offices, has access to the team responsible for the infrastructure in Amazon, which sought another location in the immediate vicinity for more offices. The company lacks at least 800 tables in the area, according to a Dan Director on the subject with a member of the facility team. The manager has noted a shortage of the place and parking, combined too long now that employees should be in the office five days a week. About 600 employees added their name to an electronic issue that supports the application, the manager said.

Amazon said the company operates to make sure that all bay area employees have seating. “Most of our employees have dedicated work environments,” Amazon spokeswoman wrote an email. “Of the hundreds of offices we have around the world, there is only a relatively small number that is not really ready to get everyone back for five days a week.”

According to Jeff Paris, who works at Amazon Webb Sarvis, Austin, Texas for more than a decade, on January 6 – the first day to return to full office time – he tried to find parking and “sent back to the street by security in the parking lot,” Paris wrote on the social network X and added: “2,000 people, 900 parking spaces.”

Paris, Amazon main technical technology, did not respond to the newspaper’s request.

As part of the office return program, some of the activities in several main sites are assembled. In a large division that belongs to Amazon Web Sarvis, the company’s main profit engine, ordered employees to move to a handful of cities across the US, Europe, Asia and Latin America, according to an email from November 6 reached by the Journal.

In Europe, it is London, Paris or Munich. To do this, some of the employees were required to leave the countries where they worked to move to another country. But Amazon has since spent the move in Europe, after several employees complained that the company violates the local laws.

Elizabeth Rubilad, who works in Portland, Oregon, described her first week in a full -time office. She said she had to work from three different work positions, without colleagues from the local team, and had to store her eoneller for the night, or bring them home.

“Manufacturers like before? No. Brainstorm, community, culture, burst creativity?” She wrote in a post she has since removed. “Worth it?” Rubald declined to comment.

“We had tremendous flexibility”

As is the case with many companies, Amazon workers who come to the office are still spending a lot of time in virtual meetings with other employees who work elsewhere.

According to Amazon, the company is working to unite more teams to work together from the same place. “Although we have heard from a relatively small number of employees to improve and we work to deal with them, these anecdotes do not reflect the mood of most of our team members,” said the company spokeswoman. “What we see is tremendous energy throughout our offices.”

Smith, a senior technical writer, left Amazon in December after 10 years. She was considered a virtual worker for seven years, but she was told that she could not continue to work remotely.

Smith had to travel about 100 miles in any direction from Olympia in Washington to Seattle, Oregon, or apply for a medical exemption for disabilities. Because she was not sure the exemption was approved, Smith only found a remote work at the Gitlav software company.

John Concert, an artificial intelligence scientist, left Amazon last July, after 12 years, to establish a startup of artificial intelligence. Before 2020, he said no one was worried about arriving at Amazon’s office in northern Virginia, where he worked. “We also had tremendous flexibility. No one cared where we were working,” he said.