Amazon is ordering staff back to the office five days a week as its hybrid work policy ends.
Amazon’s chief executive Andy Jassy said in a memo to staff that the change will come into force in January.
“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid,” he said, adding that it would help staff be “better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other”.
Mr. Jassy has long been known as a skeptic of remote work, but Amazon staff were previously allowed to work from home two days a week.
Amazon’s push to get corporate staff back into the office has been a source of tension within the firm which employs more than 1.5 million people globally in full-time and part-time roles.
Staff at its Seattle headquarters staged a protest last year as the company tightened the full remote work allowance that was put in place during the pandemic.
Amazon subsequently fired the protest organizer, prompting claims of unfair retaliation, a dispute that has been taken up with labor officials.
In his message on Monday, Mr Jassy said he was worried that Amazon – which has long prided itself on preserving the intensity of a start-up while growing to become a tech giant – was seeing its corporate culture diluted by flexible work and too many bureaucratic layers.
Mr. Jassy, who replaced founder Jeff Bezos as chief executive in 2021, said he had created a “bureaucracy mailbox” for staff to make complaints about unnecessary rules and the company was asking managers to reorganize so that managers are overseeing more people.
In addition to returning to the office five days a week, Amazon said it would end hot-desking in the US, although it will continue in most of Europe.
The company said staff could still work from home in unusual circumstances, such as a sick child or house emergency, as was the case before the pandemic.
But unless they have been granted an exemption, Mr Jassy said: “Our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances.”