Amazon.com Inc. said in an internal memo this week that it expects most of its U.S. employees to return to the office “by early fall”.
“In the U.S., as vaccines become broadly available in the next few months, we expect more people will start coming into the office through the summer, with most back in the office by early fall,” Amazon said in a note to employees dated Tuesday, later posted on a company blog, according to Bloomberg. The company also said it expects the return in Europe to “take longer given recent setbacks” like a botched vaccine rollout in the region.
Like other large companies with a huge workforce, Amazon has been forced to aid its workforce in adapting during the pandemic-inflicted year of 2020 as social-distancing protocols prevented offices from operating normally. As a result, work-from-home culture has been prevalent among employees now.
But a year after the pandemic, the end is somewhere in sight as vaccinations are distributed across the US. Companies are considering how to transform the workplace into post-pandemic-ready spaces and how to bring workers back into offices.
Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services (AWS), Amazon’s cloud service, and the incoming CEO of Amazon at large, has said that the future of work will be “hot offices where you decide which day you’re going to come in and then you reserve a desk,” according to CNBC.
Considering U.S. private-sector employment, Amazon is only second to Walmart Inc. and the biggest employer in hometown Seattle. Since the beginning of the pandemic, most of the company’s office staff have been working from home, but its warehouse employees and delivery drivers stayed on the job as they were deemed essential workers.
International Business Machines Corp. and Alphabet Inc.-owned Google also gave more details about their return-to-work plans this week.
