Amazon’s return-to-office plans spark concern and debate among employees

Some at Amazon said they were surprised and disappointed. On social-media sites, employees complained about added commute times. Others were fine with the change, saying they were already in the office at least four days a week.

“People are not happy about it," said one Amazon software engineer in an interview on Tuesday. “It seems unreasonable and stands against data that people are still productive out of the office."

Amazon’s new office policy marks a significant shift for a tech industry where most employers have embraced hybrid work. Only 7% of large tech companies require employees to be in the office five days a week, compared with 33% for all U.S. companies, according to Flex Index, a software firm that tracks return-to-office efforts. Tech companies have often spearheaded major shifts in office policies during and after the Covid-19 pandemic.

In addition to the new return-to-office norms, Amazon said Monday that it might be thinning out its management staff. In an internal memo to employees, Amazon left open the possibility that some positions might be eliminated as it restructured its departments to have fewer managers per team.

“It’s possible that organizations may identify roles that are no longer required," the internal memo said.

Critics fear the moves may allow Amazon to shrink its workforce without official layoffs. Amazon said its return-to-office rules are separate from its restructuring plans. A company spokesman said the changes are an effort to strengthen its culture.

Amazon executives defended the changes by pointing to the hundreds of thousands of company warehouse employees who have had to go in to work each day, even during the pandemic.

“I think about all of our fulfillment center workers, they show up in the office every day," Dharmesh Mehta, Amazon’s vice president in its marketplace business, said Tuesday. “There’s no way for them to get their jobs done without being right there in the fulfillment center."

Amazon told its employees that it was working on the logistics of the new policies. In the internal memo, the company said that it planned to install an additional 3,500 phone booths and that employees would be assigned desks.

A main theme in Chief Executive Andy Jassy’s announcement Monday was tackling bureaucracy at the company, which has grown as its corporate staff swelled to more than 350,000 employees. Amazon employs more than 1.5 million people in total.

Historically, Jassy and other senior members of Amazon have said they want to ensure that the company stays nimble. The company strives to avoid what it has dubbed the “Day 2" mentality, a dreaded term inside Amazon that symbolizes corporate stagnation. Founder Jeff Bezos has described it as “stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death."

Amazon, in its internal memo, said fewer managers should help the company “increase our teammates’ agility and ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, and drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it impacts customers."

While some employees and other observers predicted resistance, Amazon made clear it would enforce its policies. The company said in a memo that it would be keeping track of when employees swipe their badges to enter office spaces.

It said it hoped “that over time this will no longer be necessary."

Other companies are paying attention to what Amazon is doing, said Rob Sadow, CEO of Flex Index.

Large corporations will ask, “Do they know something that we don’t know?" he said. “Is there something in their data or in the way that they operate that’s finding that full time in office is going to be better?"

Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom said that while some large companies may try to duplicate Amazon’s efforts, it will be difficult to convince employees to revert to five days a week.

Workers reported working from home 28% of the time in August, which hasn’t budged from 2023, according to research from Bloom and his colleagues. That figure was 7% before the pandemic.

There has also been little movement in occupancy rates in corporate offices. Office occupancy rates in 10 major U.S. cities have been at about 50% for months, according to security provider Kastle Systems. Fridays have been particularly tough for employers to get employees back in the office.

“We are very clearly not going back to 2019," Bloom said. “That is just a different era now."

Write to Sebastian Herrera at sebastian.herrera@wsj.com and Joseph De Avila at joseph.deavila@wsj.com