Amazon postpones return-to-office mandate in several cities due to lack of office space

Amazon will delay a Requirement that all employees work From the office in at least seven major cities, according to a new report from Bloomberg. the reason? The online retail giant does not have enough office space for its employees to work.

Amazon first announced in September that corporate employees would soon need to work from the office five days a week, something that upset workers who have found many companies offering more flexible work-from-home arrangements since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. The beginning of the new term of return to office shall be the beginning of the new year.

But workers in at least seven cities have been told they won’t need to come into their offices as frequently until more office space is found, according to Bloomberg. The cities include Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, New York and Phoenix, and it is not clear how many of Amazon’s 350,000 employees globally will be affected, although Amazon told Bloomberg that the “vast majority” of workers will return to the office on January 2.

Why does Amazon want workers to return to their offices? When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the move in… Blog post On September 16, he dropped a slew of buzzwords that didn’t actually mean anything and were incredibly confusing. One notable sentence was filled with so many commas and semicolons that you could hardly find any concise meaning in it at all:

I’ve previously explained these benefits (February 2023 post), but in short, we’ve noticed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and reinforce our culture; Collaboration, brainstorming and invention are simpler and more effective; Teaching and learning from each other became more seamless; Teams tend to be better connected to each other.

Okay.

What is the real reason behind Amazon doing this? There are two dominant theories. The first is that commercial real estate has suffered since the onset of the Covid pandemic, and artificially propping up property values ​​helps the ruling class. It’s funny, of course, that Amazon is struggling to find enough office space in this scenario.

The second theory is that Amazon wants to lay off workers but instead chooses to make things more difficult for employees as a way to get workers to quit on their own. When you lay off workers in a company, it is often necessary to provide severance pay, but if someone quits on their own, the company does not need to deal with those additional costs. This strategy is not new but it seems to encourage the most in-demand employees to leave where they can find work at competing companies.

In fact, A Recent study It found that companies that had stricter return-to-office mandates had higher turnover rates and were losing their most senior and skilled employees. Female employee turnover was three times higher than male turnover, likely because women bear a greater burden of childcare and household responsibilities in the United States.

When Amazon finally finds enough office space to house all of its employees, workers will still be faced with the reality of modern office design It is garbage. American companies have built coworking spaces where people work individually and closed rooms that can be rented for large meetings that may be ideal for individuals. This creates unnecessary conflict in the office.

From Bloomberg:

Some workers say the company is still struggling to host people three days a week. In recent interviews, employees complained about working from shared offices, crowded corporate canteens, and a lack of meeting rooms for confidential calls or team meetings. The company has added a feature to its room booking tool that requires workers to attest that they actually plan to use the space, an apparent effort to crack down on squatters looking for a quiet place to work.

But what will you do? Working from home and getting some work done virtually? That’s not going to keep commercial real estate prices high, is it?