Amazon delays return to office delivery in many 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 be required to work from the office five days a week, something that upset workers who have since found many companies offering more flexible work-from-home arrangements the beginning of the covid-19 pandemic in. 2020. The start of this new term back in office was supposed to be the beginning of the new year.

But workers in at least seven cities have been told they don’t need to come into the office that often until they find more office space, according to Bloomberg. The cities include Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, Houston, Nashville, New York and Phoenix, and it’s unclear how many of Amazon’s 350,000 corporate employees worldwide will be affected, though Amazon told Bloomberg that “most” of workers will return to the world. office on January 2.

Why does Amazon want workers to return to the office? When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced the move in a blog post on September 16, he threw out a bunch of buzzwords that didn’t mean anything and were incredibly confusing. One sentence that stands out was filled with so many commas and semicolons that you’d be hard-pressed to find a succinct meaning in it all:

I explained these benefits before (February 2023 post), but in summary, we observed that it is easier for our partners to learn, modify, practice and strengthen our culture; collaboration, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from each other are more fluid; and, teams tend to be better connected to each other.

All right.

What is the real reason Amazon would do this? There are two dominant theories. The first is that commercial real estate has suffered since the beginning of the covid pandemic and that artificially lowering real estate values ​​helps the ruling class. It is curious, of course, that Amazon is struggling to find enough office space in this scenario.

The second theory is that Amazon wants to make layoffs, but instead chooses to make things more difficult for employees as a way to make workers leave on their own. When removing corporate workers, it is often necessary to provide compensation, but if someone leaves on their own, the company does not have to deal with those extra costs. This strategy is not new, but it seems to encourage the most sought-after employees to leave since they can find work at competing companies.

In fact, a recent study found that companies that had the strictest back-to-office mandates had higher turnover rates and were losing their most senior and skilled employees. Female employees had a turnover rate three times higher than men, likely due to women bearing a higher burden for child care and domestic responsibilities in the United States.

When Amazon finally finds enough office space to accommodate all its employees, workers will still be faced with the fact that the design of the modern office. it’s garbage. American companies have built communal work spaces where people work individually and closed rooms that can be rented for large gatherings that would be ideal for individuals. That creates unnecessary conflict in the office.

From Bloomberg:

Some workers say the company is still struggling to accommodate people three days a week. In recent interviews, employees complained about working from shared desks, crowded corporate canteens and a lack of conference 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 are you going to do? Is working from home really a job done? That’s not going to keep commercial real estate prices down, right?