Starting next year, Amazon employees will have to work from the office five days a week. CEO Andy Jassy announced the order to return to the office in a lengthy memo sent to employees on Monday.
In his note to employees, Jesse said, “We have decided that we will continue to work in the office as we did before the onset of Covid. When we look back at the last five years, we believe that the benefits of being together in the office are immense.”
From working remotely to returning to the office
Like many other companies around the world, Amazon asked employees to work from home during the Covid pandemic four years ago. It later implemented a hybrid policy, under which employees had to work from the office three days a week.
Amazon's latest decision marks a change from its earlier stance on remote work.
In his memo, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that working from the office for the last 15 months has strengthened his belief in the benefits of working from the office.
“We have been in the office at least three days a week over the last 15 months, which has further strengthened our confidence in the benefits,” he said.
Speaking about the benefits of working from the office, he said: “We have seen that it is easier for our teammates to learn, emulate, practice, and strengthen our culture; it is simpler and more effective to collaborate, brainstorm, and invent; it is more seamless to learn from and teach each other; and, teams are better connected to each other.”
Some exceptions
The JC said that from January 2, 2025, employees will be expected to attend the office five days a week “barring exceptional circumstances”.
They can also work remotely if their request is approved by their organisation’s S-team leader – a group of executives who report directly to the CEO.
“Before the pandemic, not everyone was going into the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child was sick, if you had an emergency at home, if you were on the road to meet clients or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people worked remotely. That was understood, and that's how it will continue to be,” Jassy said.
“But, prior to the pandemic, it wasn’t a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will continue to be true going forward — our expectation is that people will be in the office except in exceptional circumstances (like those noted above) or if you already have a remote work exception approved through your S-Team leader.”
The company also plans to reintroduce assigned seating in some of its offices.
Full text of Andy Jassy's memo
Here's the full text of the memo sent to employees by Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, which CNBC viewed:
Hey team. I wanted to send a note about some changes we're making to further strengthen our culture and teams.
First, for perspective, I think I'm very pleased with the progress we're making together. Stores, AWS and advertising are growing on a very large base, Prime Video continues to expand, and new investment areas like GenAI, Kuiper, healthcare and many others are developing well. And at the same time as we're growing and inventing, we're also continuing to make progress on our cost structure and operating margins, which is not easy to do. Overall, I like the direction we're headed in and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.
When I think about my time at Amazon, I never thought I would be at the company for 27 years. My plan (which my wife and I agreed on on a napkin in 1997) was to stay here for a few years and move back to NYC. Part of the reason I've stayed here is the phenomenal growth (we had $15M in annual revenue before I joined – it should be over $600B this year), the constant hunger to invent, the passion to make customers' lives easier and better every day, and the opportunities that come with these priorities. But the biggest reason I'm still here is our culture. Being so focused on customers is a driving part of it, but it's also tied to the people we work with, the way we collaborate and invent when we're at our best, our long-term vision, the ownership I've always felt at every level (I started at Level 5), the speed at which we make decisions and move forward, and the lack of bureaucracy and politics.
Our culture is unique, and has been the most important part of our success over our first 29 years. But, keeping our culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time. When you consider the breadth of our businesses, their respective growth rates, the innovation required in each of them, and the number of people we've hired over the last 6-8 years to pursue these efforts, this is quite unusual – and would stretch even the strongest cultures. Strengthening our culture is a top priority for the S-Team and me. And, I think about it all the time.
We want to act like the world's biggest startups. This means a passion to constantly invent for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it's a race!), high ownership, fast decision making, frugality and frugality, deeply embedded collaboration (you must work closely with your peers when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.
The two areas the S-Team and I have been thinking about over the past several months are: 1/ Do we have the right organizational structure to drive the desired level of ownership and speed? 2/ Are we equipped to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other (and our culture) to deliver what's best for customers and the business? We think we can be better on both counts.
On the first topic, we have always tried to hire very smart, highly decision-making, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we always want the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership. As we have grown our teams quickly and substantially over the past several years, we have added a lot of managers. In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. This has created artifacts we want to change (e.g., pre-meetings for decision meetings, a long line of managers who feel they need to review a topic before moving forward, initiative owners who feel they should not make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.). Most of the decisions we make are two-way, and as such, we want as many of our team members as possible to feel they can move quickly without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms, and layers that create overhead and waste valuable time.
So, we're asking every S-Team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and make organizations more flat than they are today. If we do this well, it will increase our teammates' ability to move faster, clarify and empower their sense of ownership, move decision-making closer to the front lines where it has the greatest impact on customers (and the business), reduce bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations' ability to make customers' lives better and easier every day. We'll do this thoughtfully, and our PxT team will be working closely with our leaders to evolve our organizations to meet these goals over the next few months.
[By the way, I’ve created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out…to be clear, companies need process to run effectively, and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I will read these emails and action them accordingly.]
To address the second issue, staying connected enough to each other and our culture to invent, collaborate, and deliver the best for customers and the business, we have decided we are going to go back to the office as we were before COVID started. When we look back over the last five years, we believe the benefits of being together in the office are significant. I have explained these benefits before (February 2023 post), but in short, we have noticed that it is easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and reinforce our culture; it is simpler and more effective to collaborate, brainstorm, and invent; it is more seamless to teach and learn from each other; and, teams are better connected to each other. If anything, the fact that we have been back in the office at least three days a week over the last 15 months has strengthened our belief in the benefits.
Before the pandemic, not everyone was in the office five days per week. People worked remotely if you or your child was sick, if you had an emergency at home, if you were going out to meet clients or partners, if you needed a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment. That was understood, and it will continue to be the case. But, before the pandemic, it was not a given that people could work remotely two days per week, and that will continue to be true — our expectation is that people will be in the office except in exceptional circumstances (like those mentioned above) or if you already have a remote work exception approved by your S-Team leader.
We're also going to revert to agile desk arrangements in locations that were previously arranged that way, including the U.S. headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington). In locations that had agile desk arrangements before the pandemic, including most of Europe, we'll continue to operate that way.
We understand that some of our colleagues may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days a week will require some adjustment. To help ensure a smooth transition, we are going to activate this new expectation on January 2, 2025. Global Real Estate & Facilities (GREF) is working on a plan to accommodate the desk arrangements mentioned above and will communicate details when they are finalized.
I want to thank our leaders and support teams in advance for the work they will do to improve our organizational structure over the coming months. For a company of our size and complexity, the work will not be easy and it will test our collective ability to invent and simplify when it comes to how we organize and take advantage of the meaningful opportunities that exist across all of our businesses.
Having the right culture at Amazon is something I don't take lightly. I believe we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers' lives, innovate on their behalf, and solve their problems as quickly as possible. I hope these changes will help us accomplish these goals while strengthening our culture and the effectiveness of our teams.
Thanks, Andy