Amazon delays RTO mandate for thousands of workers due to space

Amazon.com Inc. won’t have enough space for thousands of employees when they start returning to the office five days a week next month.

The company recently told some personnel working in at least seven cities – including Dallas, Phoenix and Austin, Texas – that their return dates will be pushed back as much as four months, according to people familiar with the situation.

The delay is the latest twist in a return-to-office saga that has roiled Amazon’s normally heads-down workforce. Some employees say they’re unhappy about being asked to come in full time when many of their tech industry peers have more flexible work arrangements.

Amazon employs more than 350,000 corporate employees worldwide – mostly in the U.S. – and it’s not clear precisely how many people are affected by the return-to-office delays. A company spokesperson said the vast majority of employees will have desks starting on Jan. 2.

Employees in Dallas were recently told there wouldn’t be sufficient space for them all to work five days a week in the office until March or April, one of the people said. Some workers in the company’s Midtown Manhattan office in the Lord & Taylor building might not have space for full-time work until May, another person said. Amazon also notified employees in Atlanta, Houston and Nashville, Tennessee, that it didn’t have sufficient space for them all to return in January, Business Insider reported Monday.

When Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy announced the aggressive return-to-work mandate in September, he and other executives said it was necessary to nurture an eroding company culture. But some employees suspect the mandate is an effort to thin the ranks and avoid layoffs and severance payments. Amazon denies this.

Employees say they have proved in recent years that teams can be effective while working remotely. Some of those affected by the RTO delay reacted with relief – evidence that the five-day office mandate is widely unpopular.

For more than a year, most Amazon employees have been asked to badge in three days a week, though there are exceptions for teams and fully remote positions. Amazon didn’t have enough seats ready for that initial return-to-office plan, including in Bellevue, where Amazon has focused much of its headquarters growth after building out its Seattle campus.

Some workers say the company is still struggling to host people three days a week. In recent interviews, employees complained of 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 reservation tool that requires workers to attest they actually plan to use the space, an apparent effort to crack down on squatters looking for a quiet place to work.

It’s not an ideal moment to be seeking new office space. While vacancies soared as remote work surged during the pandemic, there’s a shortage of the high-quality space typically leased by tech companies. Amazon has been leasing temporary space from WeWork in New York and Silicon Valley in recent weeks, a WeWork spokesperson confirmed.

Coming out of the pandemic, Amazon froze hiring and tapped the brakes on its real estate development, pausing high-profile office projects in Bellevue, Nashville and at the company’s second headquarters campus in Arlington, Virginia.

Some of those projects have since resumed and could eventually ease the strain.

A spokesperson said that in most cases, the return-to-office delays are the result of reconfigurations of buildings that had been laid out to accommodate part-time remote workers, rather than a lack of available office space.