Whole Foods CEO tells staff he wants to make Amazon’s RTO mandate more ‘carrot’ than ‘stick’

Amazon’s five-day back-to-office order sent shock waves across the company and the business world last month. On Tuesday, Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel took to the microphone to allay the concerns of employees at the Amazon-owned grocery chain.

Saying he wants Whole Foods employees to feel incentivized rather than relegated to coming to the office every day, Buechel touted initiatives like an “office experience task force” during a special meeting to address RTO policy.

“I want us to figure out how we find a win-win in supporting Whole Foods Market, our team members, our customers and more,” Buechel said at Tuesday’s meeting, a transcript of which was reviewed by wealth.

“Our goal here is not to make this look like a stick,” he added. “We want to help create and work with our team members (in) having the carrot and getting the excitement to bring back the culture and ultimately the interactions we once had in our offices across the company.”

Buechel said his leadership team fielded 1,200 questions before the meeting, which lasted just under an hour. Three employees who attended the meeting in person were also given the microphone to ask questions.

The town hall comes two weeks after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that his company, which bought Whole Foods in 2017, would return to five full days on Jan. 2, 2025, after nearly five years on the job remote and hybrid at Amazon. and its subsidiaries. Whole Foods spokeswoman Rachel Malish only confirmed that Whole Foods staff will comply with Amazon’s new mandate, but did not respond to wealthhis questions about the staff meeting.

Jassy’s announcement came as a tacit acknowledgment of a disintegrating corporate culture inside Amazon in recent years, as wealth chronicled recently. Jassy also noted that Amazon would seek to reduce middle management and bureaucracy that the CEO believes is too much, by reducing the ratio of middle managers to individual employees by 15 percent. A Whole Foods employee questioned management on Tuesday about how such a cut would be made at the organic grocery chain. But Brian O’Connell, Whole Foods’ chief human resources officer, told employees that number is only a “target” and that the grocer has “already done a lot of good work” in reducing that ratio over the past year.

“I can’t imagine we’re going to do a 15 percent discount,” he said.

Among other questions employees raised with management were questions about why Whole Foods workers should follow Amazon’s mandate when their pay doesn’t always match that of their parent company counterparts, if the move was intended to force staff to leave, to how management plans to deal with a potential brain drain.

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Leadership gave vague answers to many questions—“freedom within a norm of an office-based culture” was a phrase from a Whole Foods marketing executive that particularly irked employees—and failed to explain how five days on the job would solve problems that three days in person couldn’t. But Buechel was adamant that the mandate was not meant as an alternative to layoffs and that there would be flexibility to work from home when quiet time is needed to meet a deadline or if an unexpected personal need dictates it.

Buechel and other company executives outlined efforts such as creating a new “office experience task force” made up of employees from across the company’s divisions, who would be tasked with brainstorming ideas to help staff transition from their current hybrid structure of three days to a new three-day hybrid structure. “Desk-Based Culture”.

“What are the things we can do to make it interesting to come here and experience and work with our team members day in and day out?” asked the rhetorical director.

The responsibility for figuring out how that balancing act will work will fall to individual managers, Buechel said. As for the company tracking how often employees come into the office, which Jassy said will continue during the transition to full office work, the Whole Foods CEO said it will continue for now, but “my goal is to get rid of it”. if employees “work responsibly”.

“I don’t want us to be in this space,” he said. “I don’t want it to look like we’re running an 8-to-5 clock. And I don’t want to be in a place where we’re watching that.”

Are you a current or former Whole Foods employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at [email protected], [email protected]or through the secure messaging app Signal at 917-655-4267. You can also send him messages on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com