Amazon’s Return-To-Workplace Push Now Consists of Transferring Workers To Its Largest City Hubs

Amazon is stepping up its campaign to put personal work back at the forefront.

The tech giant informed employees working remotely or in cities with smaller offices that they may need to relocate to the company’s largest job centers, The Wall Street Journal reports. Amazon’s largest corporate offices — known as “main centers” — include its Seattle-area headquarters, HQ2 campus in Arlington, Virginia, and locations in New York, San Francisco, and Nashville.

Courtesy of Amazon

The two new office towers in the Metropolitan Park project, the first phase of Amazon HQ2.

Amazon’s push to return to the office began in February, when the company announced that most employees would have to work in person three days a week. Office staff began to grow massively in May when the company opened the doors to Metropolitan Park, the 2.2 million SF first phase of its HQ2 just outside of Washington, DC

The company is one of many large employers to face worker resistance to moving away from remote work after protests and work stoppages at its Bellevue, Wash., headquarters in late May.

Holly Sullivan, Amazon’s vice president of global economic development, told Bisnow in June that she hadn’t heard a single complaint about the personal work of office workers in the Arlington and Nashville areas, where the company opened a 566K SF building in 2021 as part of a planned operations center.

Further construction at HQ2, Nashville and Bellevue was officially put on hold last year as Amazon said it was reconsidering the use of its physical spaces, but Sullivan said success in filling in the metropolitan park gives the company confidence to potentially resume those plans as early as next year.

In recent months, business executives have taken a firm stance against constant remote work at more and more companies, leading to a surge in office occupancy and occupancy in the second quarter.

Although the company offers relocation bonuses as a carrot for employees it’s asked to move, Amazon has also pulled the stick by encouraging workers who opposed the change to either quit or seek a transfer to other departments, Business Insider reports.