Amazon says its 'office-centric' model is here to stay and will bring most US employees back by the fall

• Amazon said it will gradually start bringing employees back to the office throughout the summer.
• The intent is to "return to an office-centric culture as our baseline," Amazon said in a blog post.
• A year into the pandemic, employers are considering how and if remote workers will return.

Amazon plans start bringing employees back to its offices on June 30, with most US workers returning by early fall.

In a Tuesday blog post, Amazon said that as vaccines are distributed in the company's various markets, it will start gradually bringing employees back over the course of the summer. The company also said it expects the return in Europe to "take longer given recent setbacks" like a botched vaccine rollout in the region.

Amazon said its "plan is to return to an office-centric culture as our baseline."

"We believe it enables us to invent, collaborate, and learn together most effectively," it added.

Amazon, like other large companies, has been forced to aid its workforce in adapting during the pandemic as social-distancing protocols prevented offices from operating normally. As a result, employees have largely settled into working remotely from their homes.

But a year after the pandemic initially upended life as we know it, the end is somewhere in sight as vaccinations are distributed across the US. Employers are considering how to bring workers back into offices - and how to transform the workplace into post-pandemic-ready spaces.

Andy Jassy, the current CEO of Amazon Web Services and the incoming CEO of Amazon at large, has said that the future of work will be "hot offices where you decide which day you're going to come in and then you reserve a desk," Jassy told CNBC.

Jassy said December that he anticipates employees working mostly remotely in the future and will come into the office for certain projects.

Other tech companies have said they are taking similar approaches. Google CEO Sundar Pichai, for example, told employees in December that the company won't send employees back to the office until September 2021. And when it does, it will experiment with a "flexible work week" that would allow employees to work at least three days a week in the office and the rest at home.