Amazon Will Let Individual Teams Decide Their Own Work-From-Home Arrangements

Amazon has now updated its work-from-home policy for corporate employees as the world begins to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic, offering its individual teams the power to decide on an arrangement that best suits their needs.

The original plan for the e-commerce giant was to have everyone return to the office in January 2022, but the company’s CEO Andy Jassy has now decided on a change in direction. In an email to its office workers, the company’s head explained that individual teams will now have the option to decide what kind of arrangement best suits their work models:

“For our corporate roles, instead of specifying that people work a baseline of three days a week in the office, we’re going to leave this decision up to individual teams. This decision will be made team by team at the Director level. We expect that there will be teams that continue working mostly remotely, others that will work some combination of remotely and in the office, and still others that will decide customers are best served having the team work mostly in the office. We’re intentionally not prescribing how many days or which days—this is for Directors to determine with their senior leaders and teams. The decisions should be guided by what will be most effective for our customers; and not surprisingly, we will all continue to be evaluated by how we deliver for customers, regardless of where the work is performed.”

While the new measures will give employees greater flexibility, Jassy also says that “we want most of our people close enough to their core team that they can easily travel to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice,” although they’ll also be able to work for up to four weeks fully remotely every year, as long as they stay within the country in which they’re employed.

Elsewhere in the tech industry, Apple has filed an appeal for its ongoing legal battle against Epic Games.