Amazon stops smart working: why it is difficult to assess whether there will be a follow-up

"Hey team, we have decided that we will return to being present in the office as we were before Covid started." That is, five days out of five. The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, explained in a long letter to workers (1.5 million between corporate and operations) that the beginning of 2025 will mark the return of everyone to the office. With exceptions, because 'before the pandemic, not everyone was in the office five days a week, every week,' recalls Jassy, who has worked at Amazon for 27 years. If you or your child were sick, if you had some kind of domestic emergency, if you were travelling to meet clients or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish programming in a more isolated environment, it was possible to work remotely. This was understood and this too will go on'. Amazon will therefore continue to think in terms of flexibility, but it will no longer be obvious to anyone to think in terms of two days a week remotely, as today.

The timing suggests that the next few months will be needed to make the necessary adjustments to ground the plan, not least because there are such pushes and counter-pushes on the issue that it is difficult to say what will happen and whether the Amazon return to the past will be followed by other companies. In our country there are different approaches, such as that of Unipol, which has never supported smart working, and a few signs, such as that of Panini, which has chosen to halve its remote days, but it would seem premature to speak of a new wave in one direction rather than another. The large companies we have heard from in Italy from Enel to Eni to Intesa, Unicredit, Generali and Sace confirm the use of the tool in the mode also shared with the trade union.

After all, each company has a different DNA and culture and, as the top manager explains, it is precisely the cultural element and the need to 'further strengthen our culture and our teams' that determined the choice, which arrived to the workers in the all-too-quick reading time of Jassy's impassioned letter, which traces the company's history, results - 'we had an annual turnover of $15 million the year before I joined, this year it should be well above $600 billion' - and looks to the very challenging future goals. "Being so customer-focused is an exciting part," Jassy recalls, "but so are the people we work with, the way we collaborate and invent when we are at our best, our long-term perspective, the responsibility I have always felt at every level, (I started as a Level 5), the speed with which we make decisions and move, and the lack of bureaucracy and politics. Our culture is unique and is part of our success. But one should never take anything for granted. For the workers the two days of smart working per week, for society 'its own culture that is not a birthright. You have to work on it all the time' and 'strengthening our culture remains a top priority for me and the s-team. And I think about it all the time'.

Smart working will increasingly be a thing of the past for Amazon because the company has realised that being together has many more advantages. As Jassy explains, 'when we look back over the last five years, we still believe that the benefits of being together in the office are significant. We have observed that it is easier for our teammates to learn, shape, practice and reinforce our culture'. And then again "collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are easier and more effective". As well as 'teaching and learning from each other are more fluid'. And teams? "They tend to be better connected". The last 15 months of working in the office at least three days a week 'have reinforced our belief in the benefits'.

The manager does not leave out the topic of topics, namely locations and possible resignations. Massive smart working has greatly reduced work spaces and introduced what he calls agile desks, i.e. shared desks. On this, too, there is a return to the past. "We will also restore the arrangement of assigned workstations in locations previously organised in this way, including the US headquarters (Puget Sound and Arlington). For locations that had nimble desks prior to the pandemic, including much of Europe, we will continue to operate in this manner." Jassy is well aware that he is saying things that not all workers will appreciate because, perhaps, 'they may have set up their personal lives in such a way that going back to the office consistently five days a week will require some adjustments'. But he also remembers that he had planned to return to New York after a few years and instead did not because he found more reasons to stay in Seattle than to return to the Big Apple. It is easy to foresee a wave of resignations especially among the tech workers who have more market. But the path has been taken and even the eventual disadvantages, perhaps, will have already been taken into account by the company.