Amazon says hot desks don’t work for headquarters staff in the RTO era

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy

Amazon is ramping up efforts to return to a traditional office, and its latest move ensures everyone is working at their own desks.

CEO Andy Jassy, who was previously Amazon’s cloud services head, said in 2020 that hot desking was the future of offices. Unassigned desks help companies save on real estate because they typically have fewer desks than employees, rather than assigned workstations.

In a December 2020 interview with CNBC, Jassy predicted that individual offices or cube space would become “hot offices, where you decide which day you’re going to come in and then you reserve a desk.”

In a Monday memo to employees, Jassy said that the company is going to bring back assigned desks in offices that once had them. These include its two headquarters in the Puget Sound region and Arlington, Virginia, which have 80,000 and 8,000 employees, respectively, according to Amazon.

Employees in offices that had a hot-desking system even before the pandemic, including in Europe, will continue to operate the same way.

The CEO announced this change along with instructions for employees to come to work all five days a week starting in January. Jassy also sent an internal Amazon document explaining how the company plans to meet its new goal to have fewer managers, B-17 reported on Monday.

Amazon’s return to office and return to a fixed-desk mandate is in line with its recent crackdown on pandemic-era benefits. In the summer, it began monitoring the hours corporate employees spend in the office, an effort to enforce the three-day return-to-office policy. The company plans to continue keeping track of badging for now, it said in an FAQ document following Monday’s memo.

On Monday, the tech giant ended an existing policy that gave employees the option to work up to four weeks per year fully remote.

The end of hot desking

While hot desking was first introduced by IBM in the 1990s, it became especially popular after the pandemic. Employees were slowly trickling back to office, so multiple people could use the same tables on different days of the week.

Big Tech was quick to get in on the action. In 2022, Meta said it would trial a workplace experience that directed employees to book desks before they arrived to work. The move was criticized for being marketed as an experience, when it was really just cost-cutting.

In 2021, Google implemented custom hot desking. Employees who no longer needed a permanent desk at the company’s Mountain View, California headquarters could scan their work badge on a pad attached to the desk. The desk would then automatically adjust to the correct height, the monitor would tilt to the employee’s preferred angle, and the nearby temperature would adjust to the employee’s preference.

But that’s gone now, and both employees and companies want their staff to have a permanent place as they push for return to office. Some offices began adding having an individual desk to their list of work perks, and Gen Z employees began decorating their cubicles with posters and desk decor.

Employees often like to have their own seats, saying that booking desks and not knowing where to sit after a long commute causes anxiety. Others hate moving their things around and having to adjust their desks and computers each time they begin to work.