The CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassy, came out this week and said that he wants to increase collaboration by mandating that all employees work in the office 5 days a week, starting January 1st. As a massive company, this change will have significant impacts on the many cities where they have offices. The added foot traffic should benefit many businesses in city centers, including Seattle, San Francisco, and many other large cities. Here is a link to the article in SFGate followed by some key excerpts.
In a message sent to staff and published on Amazon’s website, Jassy said that workers will be expected to be in the office every weekday beginning on Jan. 2, 2025. He wrote that the advanced notice is meant to help workers who “may have set up their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments.”
Amazon has some “Remote Work Exceptions,” and Jassy pointed out that house emergencies, trips and sickness will still keep some people away. But the new “expectation” is that “people will be in the office outside of extenuating circumstances.”
The mandate is likely to drive some employees to quit, but in the email Jassy also hinted at moves that may more directly lead to staff cuts. Each division of the company will be forced to boost its ratio of non-managers to managers, he wrote, promising that “having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.” He also said he’s created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for workers to flag unnecessary, inefficient workflows, and that he will “read these emails and action them accordingly.”
Jassy, who has led Amazon since 2021, framed the email around the company’s culture and said the last 15 months of having workers in their offices for at least three days a week has deepened his conviction that it serves the company for employees to be physically together. He wrote that he wants Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup,” with “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.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says it is time to get back to the office full time.
It looks like the pendulum might finally be swinging back from working remotely to working in the office. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area we are still seeing many offices only showing up 2 or 3 days per week at most. If you are an office manager planning on requiring full time attendance again, please consider upping your game by adding live indoor plants to make your space more desirable for employees return to work in person.