Beginning May 1, Amazon said its corporate employees will need to return to their physical office at least three days per week under a new hybrid work model announced in a Feb. 17 blog post from CEO Andy Jassy.

In the first half of 2020, Amazon began allowing many corporate staffers to work from home due the COVID-19 pandemic. The company later announced a flexible approach in October 2021 that allowed managers to determine how many days corporate employees would be in the office.

That will change in the next two months, Jassy said, in part because “it’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues.”

“It’s especially true for new people (and we’ve hired a lot of people in the pandemic); but it’s also true for people of all tenures at Amazon,” he wrote. “When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated.”

Jassy also predicted that collaborating and inventing will be easier and more effective with more workers returning to the office. He said there will still be certain roles — some salespeople, customer support and others — that will be exceptions to the new work model. Those roles, however, “will be a small minority,” Jassy said.

“It’s not simple to bring many thousands of employees back to our offices around the world, so we’re going to give the teams that need to do that work some time to develop a plan,” he said.