CEO Andy Jassy put it as plainly as possible when speaking at LA’s Code Conference: “We don’t have a plan to require people to come back. We don’t right now. But we’re going to proceed adaptively as we learn.” In other words, those who need the flexibility of remote work have won at one of the biggest corporate giants around — but only for now. According to Jassy today, most employees now work in physical offices while spending “some days” working from home — which sounds in line with that “two remote days per week” guidance. That sounds reasonable enough, but more than a few surveys indicate that it might not hold true: Efficiency is boosted by remote work, as is employee happiness — surely both of those benefits are a key element in inventing anything, to say nothing of the stress reduction of cutting out a long commute. Remote work opens up more potential cybersecurity concerns, but the right remote access software does a lot to help. In the end, though, perhaps it’s best to let employees decide for themselves if they’d work best remotely or in-person. After all, they can always decide for themselves and leave the company if it doesn’t see eye to eye with them.
