Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced a five-day-a-week return-to-office policy in September. According to internal documents, Amazon employees in the UK can request to work from home for up to two days a week, while staff in the Netherlands are currently following previous guidance allowing them to work from home for the same amount of time. The global five-day-a-week return-to-office policy was put into effect by Amazon on January 2. Notably, the policy seems to offer more flexibility for some European employees compared to their US-based counterparts. In the UK, employees can apply to work from home for one or two days a week, while in the Netherlands, workers can also request to work from home for up to two days a week. The specific policy for US employees, outlined in Amazon’s “Flexible Work Arrangement” document, does not explicitly state the option for employees to work from home for one or two days a week, instead indicating that exceptions may be granted on a case-by-case basis. This contrasts with Amazon’s initial announcement in September that all employees globally would be required to work from the office five days a week starting in January, though some locations have faced delays due to office space constraints or local employment regulations. In the Netherlands, Amazon’s management team communicated with employees about ongoing discussions with the works council to introduce a flexible working arrangement. For now, employees in the Netherlands are allowed to work up to two days a week from home until further updates are provided. Legal considerations and cultural differences likely influence the variations in Amazon’s return-to-office rollout across different regions. In some countries, such as the Netherlands, employers cannot enforce an RTO policy without the works council’s approval. In the UK, similar to Germany, employees have the right to formally request to work from home for one or two days a week, with the application subject to a trial period. These policies are influenced by flexible working regulations and the need for employers to consider such requests reasonably on a case-by-case basis.
Different speeds. An internal list shows more than 40 locations where Amazon’s full five-day RTO policy is delayed, including Santa Clara, California; Hamburg, Germany; and Belfast, UK. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, said in a September blog post that the decision to return full-time to the office was to help the company “further strengthen” its culture and teams. An Amazon spokesperson referred BI to that same blog post, in which Jassy also said “it was not a given” that staff could work remotely two days a week before the pandemic, and “that will also be true moving forward.” In the US, Amazon employees can submit requests for offsite work for the entirety of a week or more than 90 days, which are also reviewed on a case-by-case basis. However, unlike the policies for the UK and Germany, the US flexible working document does not specifically mention the option for employees to formally apply to work from home for one or two days a week. It only details the offsite work arrangements and part-time work arrangements. An internal Amazon FAQ document circulated at the time of the RTO announcement last year says that employees with existing approval, such as a “Military Spouse Remote Work Exception,” do not need to change where they work. Read the original article on Business Insider
