People will not be in offices 100% of the time after Covid

Amazon Web Services CEO Andy Jassy told CNBC in an interview broadcast Tuesday that he believes the coronavirus pandemic could have a lasting impact on the future of work, with a growing share of employees doing their work remotely.

“I don’t think people come back to the office 100% of the time like they used to,” Jassy told CNBC’s Jon Fortt. “I think there will be some type of hybrid model and I think it will probably differ depending on your function.”

This possibility has changed the way Amazon looks at hiring, Jassy said. Amazon is now less focused on hiring employees in places where it has “critical mass” and can instead recruit workers from any location, provided they are able to collaborate with others. other teams, he said.

In a post-pandemic world, employees who can work productively from home will continue to do so, but they will continue to come to the office when they need to work on certain projects, Jassy said. This will most likely lead to an evolution of office buildings to focus on collaboration and meeting spaces.

“I suspect a lot of these office buildings will start to evolve from optimizing for individual offices or cubic spaces to warm offices where you decide what day you’re going to walk in and then book an office,” Jassy said.

Amazon has signaled during the coronavirus pandemic that it expects office work to return in the near future. In August, Amazon announced that it would expand its physical offices in six major US cities, including Dallas, Detroit, Denver, New York, Phoenix and San Diego, representing 900,000 square feet of new offices. This will create approximately 3,500 business jobs as a result of the move.

Other tech companies have doubled down on remote work. Twitter and Square employees are allowed to work from home “forever,” while Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has predicted that half of the company’s employees could work remotely within the next five to ten years. Amazon has told staff who can work remotely to do so until June 2021.

Beyond changing the future of work, Jassy said the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of cloud computing. More and more companies have become dependent on cloud computing services, as most of their employees work remotely.

The change has led to increased demand for these services from Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Many companies have been considering moving to the cloud for several years, but the pandemic was the last push they needed to make the change, Jassy said.

“I mean, if you look at the history of the cloud, I have a feeling that the pandemic will have accelerated the adoption of the cloud in the enterprise by a few years,” he added.