Ecommerce and tech giant Amazon has told staff that they will need to be in the office at least three days a week from the start of May.

While the Covid-19 pandemic has led to a transformative shift to remote working, many big tech firms including Twitter and Twitter have made staff return to the office either permanently or for more days per week.

In a blog post, Amazon chief exec Andy Jassy cited multiple reasons for making its corporate staff return to the office. These include ease of communication, building a cohesive work culture, and collaboration.

From 1 May, Jassy wrote, “we should go back to being in the office together the majority of the time (at least three days per week)”.

The Amazon boss noted that “a small minority” of staff will be exempt from these rules, such as “some of our salespeople, customer support, etc.” and that the company hasn’t “worked out all the execution details yet”.

He said: “It’s not simple to bring many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan. We know that it won’t be perfect at first, but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months (and years) as our real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how we want our offices to be set up to capture the new ways we want to work.”

Jassy concluded that the shift will also "provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office."

The move marks a departure from Amazon's previously announced strategy in October 2021 when it said that individual teams would be allowed to decide how many days they would work from an office in a week.

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