BI Staff

Fri, Jun 27, 2025, 4:02 PM18 min read

• Many major companies are requiring employees to return to the office full or part-time.

• Business Insider compiled a running list of the companies calling employees back.

• The list includes companies like JPMorgan, Starbucks, and Amazon.

As we reach the half-way point in the year, 2025 has seen the return-to-office push continue to expand.

The effort started to pick up steam last year, when corporate giants like Amazon and AT&T announced at the end of 2024 that they would bring their employees back into the office five days a week this year. Sweetgreen, too, said in December that it's upping support staff's in-person requirement for 2025.

Other major employers, including JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, have also abandoned the hybrid attendance policy they adopted during the pandemic and instead implemented full return-to-office mandates.

Several executives and leaders have said they believe productivity increases when workers are in the office together, while others hope to increase in-person collaboration. Even some CEOs who previously praised the flexibility of remote work have backpedaled, telling workers to comply with RTO mandates. Some are tracking attendance and firing employees who don't comply.

Here's a list, in alphabetical order, of major companies requiring employees to return to offices. Business Insider will update this list regularly.

CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a September 16 memo that Amazon would end remote work starting in 2025.

"We've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID," Jassy said. "When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant."

The CEO cited easier employee collaboration and connection and said in-person work would strengthen the company's culture. This echoes his February 2023 memo, which mandated employees spend at least three days a week in the office.

Not everyone agrees. Some Amazon employees took to an internal Slack channel to criticize the new RTO policy, BI's Ashley Stewart first reported, with one staffer writing that it was "significantly more strict and out of its mind" than pre-COVID operations.

"This is not 'going back' to how it was before," they wrote. "It's just going backwards."

The critical reaction is reminiscent of employees' response to 2023's surprise return-to-office rule. Thousands of Amazon workers joined a Slack channel to share their thoughts, with some even organizing to file a petition against the change.