Amazon Asks Some Employees to Relocate to ‘Main Hub’ Offices

Amazon.com has told employees across the company that they may have to relocate to main offices concentrated in bigger cities, an escalation of its efforts to bring workers back to the office in-person.

Managers at various Amazon businesses are telling their staff that if they are located in smaller offices or are remote workers, they may have to move to what the company calls “main hub” locations such as the company’s headquarters in Seattle, or offices in New York or San Francisco, people familiar with the matter said.

In some communications, employees are being told they have a certain amount of time to move back to their main hubs where their bosses or teams are located, even if they live close to other Amazon offices where they could work.

Amazon doesn’t have an exact definition for what a main hub is and determines it on a team-by-team basis. The number of employees or teams affected by the change is unclear.

Amazon’s push to mandate that employees return to the office has been met with resistance from many workers. Some have started jokingly referring to the policy as “disagree and commute,” a variation of one of Amazon’s leadership principles called “disagree and commit.” Internally, some have speculated that the return to office rules are another way to thin out Amazon’s workforce since it will cause a certain amount of voluntary resignations. 

Late last year through the early part of this year, Amazon laid off more than 27,000 employees. The cuts were part of a cost-cutting effort at the company, and at first targeted unprofitable businesses such as its devices arm, but later included layoffs at Amazon’s profitable cloud-computing division.  

“There’s more energy, collaboration, and connections happening since we’ve been working together at least three days per week, and we’ve heard this from lots of employees and the businesses that surround our offices,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said. “We continue to look at the best ways to bring more teams together in the same locations, and we’ll communicate directly with employees as we make decisions that affect them.” 

Amazon said that employees being asked to relocate will be eligible for relocation benefits.

Amazon’s move to push employees back to main business offices follows earlier decisions by the company to be stricter about employees returning to in-person work. The company earlier this year began to mandate that its employees work out of physical offices at least three days a week, shifting from a policy that enabled individual teams and managers to decide how often to be in the office. 

“It’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues,” Chief Executive Andy Jassy said at the time of the decision. 

Inside Amazon, some employees have feared that the shift to return to main hubs means the company is moving in the direction of requiring workers to go back to the office five days a week, according to employees. Amazon said that such a policy isn’t in place.    

Amazon’s stance has evolved throughout the pandemic. The company early on in the health crisis moved to expand its physical offices and discussed having an “office-centric culture.” 

As its tech peers offered more flexibility, however, the company shifted to giving employees more choice. In late 2021, Jassy said corporate team directors would decide if staff need to work from the office, saying then that it expected some teams to work mostly remotely while others would combine remote work and in office. The company made that pronouncement as competition for tech talent was at a high and the labor market tight. 

Things look different now. Amazon and other tech companies have laid off thousands of workers in recent months as their businesses have seen slower growth compared with early in the pandemic, and many companies across industries have moved to require more in-office work.

As one of the largest companies in the U.S. with more than 1.4 million employees globally, Amazon has long invested in its office spaces throughout the country. Besides coastal cities, the company has large offices in metro areas such as Dallas, Nashville, Tenn., and Austin, Texas.

Amazon also recently opened what it calls its “second headquarters” in Arlington, Va. Amazon opened the first phase of the development but paused construction for the second phase.  

Write to Sebastian Herrera at [email protected] and Dana Mattioli at [email protected]