Table that: Amazon delays its return to office because it doesn't even have enough office
Some workers won’t have to report 5 days a week starting Jan. 2. Maybe Amazon shouldn’t have cut back on space?
Amazon recently told workers they had to return to the office full time, but it doesn’t have enough space for everyone, Business Insider reports. Some employees in Atlanta, Houston, Nashville, and New York will have to continue in their current work arrangements beyond the January 2 deadline until the company can make room for them.
Perhaps asking everyone to come back into the office full time didn’t have the expected effect of reducing headcount. “We’re being very measured in our hiring, as you can tell, as a company where our office staff is down slightly year over year,” Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said in the company’s Q3 investor call.
Or perhaps Amazon can’t have its cake and eat it, too. The company has been rolling back some of its plans for office construction and leasing, presumably saving it loads of money, but also potentially inhibiting it from having enough space to force everyone into the office at once.
Earlier this year, The Real Deal reported that Amazon was planning to break a number of office leases in order to save $1.3 billion in expenses. The company has also indefinitely postponed the most prominent part of its HQ2 plan: its poop-emoji-shaped office tower, “The Helix.”
(It also chose an HQ3 in New York City but pulled out of those plans a year later after backlash.)
Fortunately for those who like to work from home, Amazon’s decision doesn’t seem to have had much of an effect on other companies’ RTO policies.
