As reported in February 2023, Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, announced that the company has concluded that everyone is to be back in the office the majority of the time as of May 1st. This is defined as three days per week.
In Bellevue, employees will be moving into two additional towers by the end of 2023, 555 Tower and one of the West Main towers.
555 Tower features an office space of 695,610 square feet. The company will occupy the lower 19 floors. West Main features office space that totals over one million square feet of space.
We reached out to Amazon to learn more about how the implementation of working in the office as of May 1st would affect Bellevue employees, specifically. According to the tech company, Bellevue employees will not be expected in the office at least three days a week until their building is ready.
In total, Amazon has more than 10,000 employees assigned to offices on the Eastside, which in additional to Bellevue, includes Redmond, as well. They plan to move an additional 2,000 employees to Bellevue later this year, upon the completion of West Main Tower 1 and Tower 555.
As Andy shared in his February 17 message to employees, “I’m also optimistic that this shift will provide a boost for the thousands of businesses located around our urban headquarter locations in the Puget Sound, Virginia, Nashville, and the dozens of cities around the world where our employees go to the office. Our communities matter to us, and where we can play a further role in helping them recover from the challenges of the last few years, we’re excited to do so.”
According to the Bellevue Downtown Association, downtown employee foot traffic is currently tracking 67% of early 2020 pre-pandemic levels (Placer.ai, January 2023). This number is expected to grow quickly as more office-based workers come into the office on a regular basis.
Amazon employees that work elsewhere in the Downtown Bellevue area are back in the office with a required 3-days a week. As Jassy explained in his February update with return to office plans, they know that it won’t be perfect at first (to bring employees back to the office), but the office experience will steadily improve over the coming months and years as their real estate and facilities teams smooth out the wrinkles, and ultimately keep evolving how they want their offices to be set up to capture new ways that they want to work.
