AMAZON.COM chief executive officer Andy Jassy is moving to streamline the world’s largest online retailer and cloud-computing company, cutting management layers and ordering employees to return to the office five days a week beginning in January.
The shakeup, announced in a memo to employees on Monday (Sep 16), echoed what some company veterans have been whispering for years: It’s become harder to get things done at Amazon. Stories of endless deliberation, unnecessary meetings and layers of approval have become commonplace at a company that fashions itself as a collection of teams charged with operating such as startups.
Jassy called out some of those phenomena in his note, citing “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere”.
Each major organisation within Amazon will be required to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15 per cent by the end of March 2025, Jassy said. He also announced a bureaucracy tipline for employees to raise concerns about unnecessary processes.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” he said. “That means having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), 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.”
It also means an end to Amazon’s relative flexibility on where office workers do their jobs.
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Previously, Amazon had required employees to badge in at least three days a week, depending on the requirements of their team. Amazon’s new return to office plans will make exceptions for extenuating circumstances or cases where managers had already approved a fully remote position, and employees have a few months to prepare, Jassy said.
“We understand that some of our teammates 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,” he added.
Most of Amazon’s roughly 1.5 million employees around the world are hourly employees who retrieve items and ship packages, people for whom remote work was never an option. But the company employs hundreds of thousands of office workers – it had roughly 350,000 of them on the eve of its largest-ever layoffs, which began in late 2022.
The news will likely mean a boost in downtown foot traffic in the cities where Amazon operates. That includes Seattle, where the company is by far the largest corporate tenant, suburban Bellevue, Washington as well as places such as Arlington, Virginia, the San Francisco Bay Area, Austin, Boston and Nashville.
The company’s prior efforts to get workers back in the office were met with resistance by some employees who charged that the company was inflexible and failed to provide data showing in-person work achieved better results.
“Keeping your culture strong is not a birthright,” Jassy said. “You have to work at it all the time.” BLOOMBERG
