Inside Amazon’s messy push to bring everyone back to the office

Amazon.com told hundreds of thousands of workers to be back at their desks full-time or look for another job. One hitch: In many offices there weren’t enough desks to go around.

The space crunch has led the e-commerce giant to postpone the mandate at dozens of offices around the U.S., including in Houston, Atlanta and New York City. Workers assigned to some locations are still waiting to hear when they can actually go to the office full-time.

Others who are back in five days don’t have any teammates in the same location. They find themselves jockeying for parking, a place to sit, and private rooms to make video calls.

Amazon has been a loud voice calling for workers to get back to the office. It sent shock waves across the tech world in September with its declaration that its 350,000 corporate employees would need to return to the office five days a week starting in January of this year. Those workers represent about a quarter of its total head count, which also includes warehouse workers.

Having everyone in the office was critical because “collaborating, brainstorming and inventing are simpler and more effective,” Chief Executive Andy Jassy told employees at the time. Amazon hired a lot during the pandemic when work was remote, and if employees leave because they don’t want to go to an office, that’s fine with the company.

“If it’s not for you, then that’s OK. You can go and find another company if you want to,” Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said at a Wall Street Journal event in October. “But for us, that’s what we’ve decided is the best way to operate our company.”

Implementing this policy at a giant employer with scores of locations has run into glitches.

A group of employees in the San Francisco Bay Area, where Amazon has 18 offices, submitted a plan to Amazon’s facilities team asking for a new location in the vicinity. The company is short by at least 800 desks in the region, according to a manager who has discussed the issue with a member of the facilities team. The manager cited a lack of space and parking, along with commutes that are too long now that workers need to be in five days a week. Nearly 600 employees added their names to a spreadsheet supporting the effort, the person said.

Amazon says it’s working to make sure all Bay Area personnel have seating assignments.

“The overwhelming majority of our employees have dedicated workspaces,” an Amazon spokeswoman said in an email. “Of the hundreds of offices we have all around the world, there are only a relatively small number that are not quite ready to welcome everyone back a full five days a week.”

Jeff Ferris, who has worked at Amazon Web Services for over a decade in Austin, Texas, said he scrambled to find parking on Jan. 6, his first day back full-time. “Got turned away by security at the garage,” he wrote on X. “2,000 people, 900 parking spaces.”

Ferris, whose job title is principal technologist for critical capacities, didn’t respond to requests for comment.

As part of the return-to-office plan, some operations were consolidated in a few locations. A large division within Amazon Web Services, the company’s main profit driver, ordered employees to relocate to a handful of cities across the U.S., Europe, Asia and Latin America, according to a Nov. 6 email reviewed by the Journal.

In Europe, those cities were London, Paris or Munich. Some employees would have been required to move out of the countries where they were working. The company put the requirement on hold in Europe after some employees complained that it violated local laws.

Elizabeth Robillard, who works for AWS in Portland, Ore., recently chronicled on LinkedIn what her first week back in the office full-time was like: She posted that she sat in three different desks, had no direct co-workers working from the same location, and she had to store her belongings in a locker overnight or bring them home.

“As productive as before? Nope. Riffing, community, culture, buzzing with creativity? Nope.” she wrote in a post she has since taken down. “Worth it? Nope.”

Robillard declined to comment.

As is the case at many companies, Amazon employees in the office still find themselves spending a lot of time in virtual meetings with others working in different locations.

Amazon says it is working to bring more teams together in person. “While we’ve heard ideas for improvement from a relatively small number of employees and are working to address those, these anecdotes don’t reflect the sentiment we’re hearing from most of our teammates,” the company spokeswoman said. “What we’re seeing is great energy across our offices.”

Leala Smith, a senior technical writer, left Amazon after 10 years in December. She’d been classified as a virtual employee for seven years but was told she couldn’t keep working on a remote basis.

Smith either would have to commute 65 miles each way from the outskirts of Olympia, Wash., to Seattle or file for a medical exemption because she has a disability. But she wasn’t confident her exception would be approved. She took a fully remote job with software company GitLab.

Jon Conradt, an AI scientist, left the company in July after 12 years to co-found an artificial-intelligence startup. Before 2020, he said, no one seemed concerned about attendance at the Northern Virginia Amazon office where he was based. “We also had enormous flexibility. Nobody cared where we worked,” he said.

Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com and Preetika Rana at preetika.rana@wsj.com