Amazon asks employees to come to office five days a week

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 bar 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 down 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 lead 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 strengthen 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 over the next few months to evolve our organizations to meet these goals.

[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 seen 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 on the road 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 wasn’t 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 the ones 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 five days a week on a consistent basis 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 described 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