Amazon adds yet another controversy to its policy of ending teleworking. Andy Jassy, the head of the technology multinational after the step back of Jeff Bezos, decided to adopt the most restrictive position in the sector and require all his employees to work full time from the office starting this January 2. An announcement that unleashed resignations and complaints throughout the company, which now recognizes that it does not even have enough space for employees to comply with their boss’s order.
Amazon has about 5,000 office employees in Spain. “As for Spain and Europe, only a few buildings are affected,” a spokesperson for the company, which has its headquarters in Madrid, in an office building in the Méndez Álvaro area with capacity, told elDiario.es. for about 1,000 workers. It also has seven floors of the Foster Tower (in the Las Cuatro Torres complex) with a similar space, as well as two other smaller offices in Barcelona, one dedicated to supporting SMEs that use its sales platform and another focused on the technology development.
The situation, however, affects its offices around the world. In the US, the lack of space occurs in its centers in New York, Atlanta, Houston or Nashville, according to local media. In these cases, the company has been forced to postpone its return to in-person policy, a postponement that in some cases will last until May 2025.
Amazon workers privately denounce to this medium that the objective of the measure is to make a “covert workforce cut” without carrying out direct layoffs, after having laid off 28,000 employees in 2023. Amazon, like the rest of the technology companies, carried out carried out massive hiring in 2020 and 2021 due to the rise of digital business during the pandemic, but was forced to recalculate its needs after the stabilization of the sector and the arrival of artificial intelligence.
Many of the employees who are now forced to return to the office were hired valuing Amazon’s teleworking policy. This allowed completely remote working hours until February 2023, when it was reduced to two days a week. “Before the pandemic, it was not a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will be the case again in the future,” Andy Jassy highlighted in September, when he announced the end of teleworking, giving three months and a half to its employees to adapt to the new situation.
Reduction of team leaders
In the same statement, Jassy announced that Amazon will take advantage of the end of teleworking to increase the number of employees assigned to each team leader by 15% during the first quarter of 2025. “Having fewer managers will eliminate layers and flatten organizations more than otherwise.” what they are today, the CEO of Amazon advanced in his statementwhich did not clarify how many layoffs this new policy will result in.
The goal of these measures is to make work “more fluid,” says Jassy. “As we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the benefits of being together in the office are significant,” he said in September: “We have found that it is easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture; collaborating, contributing ideas and inventing is simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from each other is more fluid; and teams tend to be better connected to each other.”
“The last 15 months in which we have returned to the office at least three days a week have reinforced our conviction about the benefits,” concluded the head of the multinational. From now on, he said, teleworking will only be an option in exceptional circumstances, such as sick children, “emergencies at home” or the need to finish a project “in a more isolated environment.”
Unrest in the squad
Some explanations that have not convinced the majority of the multinational’s office workers, who number around 350,000 around the world. The platform Blinddesigned so that employees in the technology sector, especially large corporations such as Amazon, Google or Microsoft, can anonymously share information, experiences and opinions about their workplaces, conducted a survey among 2,585 verified corporate employees of Amazon that revealed that 91 % of them were against eliminating remote work.
In addition, almost three out of every four workers at the multinational (73%) revealed that they were already looking for new jobs that would give them the opportunity to telework, a common standard in the technology industry. 32% said they knew someone who had resigned as a result of the changes within weeks of the announcement.
“The overall return to office policy is crazy, particularly for those of us who were hired remotely and FAR from an office. “I have children and family here, so we are not willing to move,” a verified Amazon professional wrote on Blind. “Even if I didn’t, there’s too big a risk that I’ll be fired in 6 months anyway, so why risk moving?”
The next results balances will clarify what percentage of employees have decided to resign and not comply with the new policy of mandatory in-person work. A practice that only Tesla and the rest of Elon Musk’s companies have imposed since the end of the pandemic, since corporations such as Google, Microsoft or Meta have adopted hybrid approaches such as the one proposed by Amazon until now.
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