Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week
Amazon is instructing corporate staffers to spend five days a week in the office, CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo on Monday.
The decision marks a significant shift from Amazon’s earlier return-to-work stance, which required corporate workers to be in the office at least three days a week. Now, the company is giving employees until Jan. 2 to start adhering to the new policy.
Amazon also plans to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers in order to “remove layers and flatten organizations,” Jassy said. The company rapidly grew its headcount over the course of the pandemic before Jassy took the helm and instituted widespread cost cuts across Amazon, including the largest layoffs in its 27 years as a public company.
Jassy wrote in a lengthy missive to staffers that Amazon is making the changes in order to strengthen its corporate culture and ensure that it remains nimble. He underscored the point by saying the company created a “bureaucracy mailbox,” or dedicated email alias, to root out any unnecessary processes or excessive rules within the company.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy wrote. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”
Hey team. I wanted to send a note on a couple changes we’re making to further strengthen our culture and teams.
First, for perspective, I feel good about the progress we’re making together. Stores, AWS, and Advertising continue to grow on very large bases, Prime Video continues to expand, and new investment areas like GenAI, Kuiper, Healthcare, and several others are evolving nicely. And at the same time we’re growing and inventing, we’re also continuing to make progress on our cost structure and operating margins, which isn’t easy to do. Overall, I like the direction in which we’re heading and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.
When I think about my time at Amazon, I never imagined I’d be at the company for 27 years. My plan (which my wife and I agreed to on a bar napkin in 1997) was to be here a few years and move back to NYC. Part of why I’ve stayed has been the unprecedented growth (we had $15M of annual revenue the year before I joined—this year should be well north of $600B), the perpetual hunger to invent, the obsession with making customers’ lives easier and better every day, and the associated opportunities these priorities present. But, the biggest reason I’m still here is our culture. Being so customer focused is an inspiring part of it, but it’s also the people we work with, the way we collaborate and invent when we’re at our best, our long-term perspective, the ownership I’ve always felt at every level I’ve worked (I…
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