Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Andy Jassy has signaled an end to the company’s work-from-home policy, telling staff in a lengthy memo on Monday that they’re going to be required to sit in the office five days a week.
The decision marks a shift from Amazon’s current policy, which requires its corporate team staffers to be in the office for a minimum of three days a week. As of Jan. 2 next year, they’ll need to be ever-present, barring extenuating circumstances.
The new policy also means that hot-desking arrangements will be canceled, and everyone will be given their own desk, except at some sites that had agile desks prior to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward — our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances,” Jassy (pictured) wrote in the memo.
Those circumstances include things such as having a child that’s sick, some kind of house emergency, or being on the road seeing customers and partners, or needing a day or two to finish coding something in a more isolated environment, Jassy added.
Justifying the shift back to five days per week, Jassy said that being in the office makes it easier for teammates to learn, model, practice and strengthen the company’s culture. It also supports better collaboration, brainstorming and innovation, he said, while enabling team members to teach and learn from each other more effectively.
“Teams tend to be better connected to one another,” he added. “If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”
The CEO didn’t level any threats against employees thinking of rebelling against the five days a week rule, but he has made thinly veiled warnings in the past. In a Q&A with staff last year, he told staff that if someone is unable to commit to working in the office three days a week, “it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.”
On the other hand, employees at Amazon may be more appreciative of Jassy’s pledge to simplify the company’s corporate structure by having fewer managers around, as part of his plan to “remove layers and flatten organizations.”
Jassy explained that each S-team organization will be expected to increase its ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Individual contributors are employees that do not manage other staffers.
As part of this process, each S-team has been ordered to review its management structure, to try to identify roles that are no longer required. Any changes will then be announced at the team level, he said.
These changes will also help to strengthen the company’s culture, Jassy said, and ensure that it remains nimble. He’s particularly interested in ways of reducing bureaucracy within the company, and to facilitate this he has created a dedicated “bureaucracy mailbox,” where staffers can suggest changes to root out unnecessary processes and excessive rules. According to Jassy, he will read each email personally.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy said of his end goal. “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.”