Amazon employees have been told to return to working from the office five days a week from the start of next year, as the giant online retailer reverses a host of pandemic-era policies.

Hot-desking will be scrapped in offices which were previously designed to have allocated desks for individuals. Layers of management will be removed to cut back on unnecessary meetings.

Amazon is overhauling working policies created during the Covid-19 pandemic because it believes having employees together on site is better for collaboration, learning and company culture.

Office working will be the norm from January 2. Previously, Amazon had required workers to show up in person at least three times a week, depending on the requirements of their team.

Employees will only be able to work away from the office in the future under special circumstances such as sickness, a house emergency, travel to see customers or partners, or the need to work in an isolated environment to finish coding.

Amazon also said it was planning to increase the staff-to-manager ratio by at least 15 per cent by the end of the first quarter of next year.

In a letter to employees, Andy Jassy, the chief executive, said: “As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers.

“In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It’s created artefacts that we’d like to change (eg, pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc).”

He recognised that some employees will have “set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments”.

However, he said that delaying the expectation until January 2 would “help ensure a smooth transition”.

The company is likely to face a backlash from some staff. Last year, employees at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters staged a walkout in protest at the group’s return-to-office mandate, as well as changes to its climate policy and layoffs.