Amazon ditches remote work and orders staff 5 days a week

The rule further tightens last year’s requirement that workers be on site at least three days a week. Jassy said “extenuating circumstances” and exceptions approved by senior leaders would continue to be accepted.

“Otherwise, the last 15 months of being back in the office at least three days a week has reinforced our belief in the benefits,” Jassy said.

As part of this initiative, employees will be reassigned to offices in their previous locations. Offices that had “agile” offices before the pandemic will continue.

Jassy also said the company will flatten its org chart by the end of March 2025, with a 15% increase in the ratio of individual contributors to managers.

“Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today,” he said, without specifying what steps the company would take to achieve that goal.

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Read the full note below:

Hey team. I wanted to send a note regarding some changes we are making to further strengthen our culture and teams.

First, for perspective, I feel good about the progress we are making together. Stores, AWS and Advertising continue to grow on a very large basis, Prime Video continues to expand, and new areas of investment such as GenAI, Kuiper, Healthcare and more are progressing nicely. And while we’re growing and inventing, we’re also continuing to make progress on our cost structure and operating margins, which isn’t easy to do. Overall, I like the direction we’re headed and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.

When I think back on my time at Amazon, I never imagined that I would be with the company for 27 years. My plan (which my wife and I agreed to on a bar napkin in 1997) was to be here for a few years and move back to NYC. Part of the reason I stayed was the unprecedented growth (we had $15 million in annual revenue the year before I joined, this year it should be well below $600 billion), the perpetual hunger for to invent, the obsession to make customers’ lives. easier and better every day and the associated opportunities these priorities present. But, the biggest reason I’m still here is our culture. Being so customer-focused is an inspiring part, but it’s also the people we work with, the way we collaborate and invent when we’re at our best, our long-term perspective, the ownership we’ve always felt at every level . We worked (started as a Level 5), the speed at which we make decisions and move, and the lack of bureaucracy and politics.

Our culture is unique and has been one of the most important parts of our success in our first 29 years. But, keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time. When you consider the scale of our businesses, the growth rates associated with them, the innovation required in each of them, and the number of people we’ve hired over the last 6-8 years to continue these efforts, it’s quite unusual – and it will expand even the strongest of cultures. Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for steam and myself. And, I think about it all the time.

We want to operate as the biggest startup in the world. That means having a passion for constantly inventing for clients, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, quick decision-making, carelessness and frugality, deeply connected collaboration (you have to join the hip). with your colleagues when inventing and solving hard problems) and a shared commitment to each other.

Two areas that I and I have been thinking about for the past few months are: 1/ do we have the right organizational structure to drive the level of ownership and speed that we want? 2/ are we ready to invent, collaborate and be connected enough with each other (and our culture) to deliver the best to our customers and business that we can? We believe we can be better at both.

On the first topic, we have always sought to hire highly intelligent, high-thinking, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we’ve always wanted the people who do the actual detailed work to have great ownership. As we’ve grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have in recent years, we’ve understandably added a lot of managers. In the process, I added even more layers than I had before. There are artifacts created that we would like to change (eg pre-meetings for pre-meetings for decision meetings, a longer line of managers who feel they need to review a topic before it moves forward, initiative owners feel less should they make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.). Most of the decisions we make are two-way doors, and as such we want more of our colleagues to feel they can move quickly without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms and layers that create surface and waste precious time.

So we’re calling on every organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we get this right, it will increase our colleagues’ ability to move quickly, clarify and reinvigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines, where it has the most impact on customers (and of business), will reduce red tape and strengthen the ability of our organizations to make customers’ lives better and easier every day. We will do this carefully, and our PxT team will work closely with our leaders to evolve our organizations to meet these goals over the next few months.

(By the way, I’ve created an “office mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have red tape or unnecessary process that has crept in and we can root it out… just to be clear, companies have need process to run efficiently and process does not amount to red tape, but unnecessary and excessive processes or rules should be denounced and extinguished. I will read these emails and act accordingly.)

To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the best to our customers and business, we decided we would go back to the office as we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being in the office together are significant. I have previously explained these benefits (Post from February 2023), but in short, we have noticed that it is easier for our colleagues to learn, model, practice and reinforce our culture; collaboration, brainstorming and invention are easier and more efficient; teaching and learning from each other are more fluid; and, teams tend to be better connected to each other. In any case, the past 15 months of being back in the office at least three days a week has reinforced our belief in the benefits.

Before the pandemic, not everyone was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child has been sick, if you’ve had some kind of emergency at home, if you’ve been on the road seeing clients or partners, if you need a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people they worked remotely. This has been understood and will continue as well. But before the pandemic, it wasn’t a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will be true in the future – our expectation is that people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances (such as mentioned above. ) or if you already have a telework exception approved by your team leader.

We will also bring back assigned office arrangements in locations that were previously organized as such, including our US headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington). For locations that had agile office arrangements before the pandemic, including much of Europe, we will continue to operate that way.

We understand that some of our colleagues may have their personal lives set up in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days a week will require some adjustments. To ensure a smooth transition, we will activate this new expectation on January 2, 2025. Global Real Estate and Facilities (GREF) is working on a plan to accommodate the above office arrangements and will communicate the details as they are. completed.

I want to thank our leaders and support teams in advance for the work they will be doing to improve their organizational structures in the coming months. With a company of our size and complexity, the work will not be trivial and will test our collective ability to innovate and simplify when it comes to how we organize and pursue the significant opportunities we have across our businesses. .

Having the right culture at Amazon is something I don’t take for granted. I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in our customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems. I am optimistic that these changes will better help us achieve these goals while strengthening our culture and the effectiveness of our teams.

Thank you,

Andy