Amazon (AMZN) Web Services CEO Matt Garman has a message for the scores of workers unhappy about the return-to-work mandate: find another job.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s (NWS) Tech Live event, Garman said Monday evening that requiring workers to be in the office five days a week starting in January is necessary for the company.
“Particularly as we really think about how do we want to disrupt and we want to invent on behalf of our customers, we find that there is no substitution for doing that in person,” Garman said, according to Business Insider.
The CEO believes innovation is best executed with speed in person. “Just the creative energy and how fast you’re able to iterate when you’re sitting there writing on a whiteboard or you’re talking to people in the cubicle next to you or you’re running into people that are in a different department, but you see them at the coffee line or whatever it is,” he said.
That’s why he happily told his employees: “If it’s not for you, then that’s okay — you can go and find another company if you want to.”
Garman said the three-day-a-week policy didn’t work because people came on different days. He also claimed that most employees were excited to be working in person.
He made a similar statement in a company-wide meeting last week, telling workers if they “just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around.”
“At Amazon, we want to be in an environment where we are working together, and we feel that collaborative environment is incredibly important for our innovation and for our culture,” he said.
When the new policy was announced, many employees took to internal forums to post their dissatisfaction. Some even publicly said they were quitting over the change.