Amazon is mandating that corporate workers return to the office five days a week, CEO Andy Jassy said in a note on Monday.
The return-to-office mandate is a sharp change from its current hybrid policy, which requires employees to work from the office at least three days a week.
Amazon employees will have until Jan. 2 to switch to the new policy.
Amazon will also be streamlining its corporate structure — management positions in particular — to “remove layers and flatten organizations,” Jassy said.
The Seattle, Wash.-based company rapidly expanded during the pandemic before Jassy took the helm in 2021 and implemented cost-cutting measures and widespread layoffs.
During his tenure, Jassy orchestrated the largest layoffs in Amazon’s 27 years as a public company.
As a result of growing the company so quickly, Amazon hired a lot of managers and “added more layers than we had before,” Jassy said.
Those layers clogged up the food chain — creating pre-meetings for meetings and a more convoluted chain of command.
“So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025,” Jassy wrote.
The company has created a “bureaucracy mailbox,” or email alias, dedicated to rooting out unnecessary steps in the company, Jassy said.
In addition to tweaking the company’s structure, Jassy said a main focus of the return-to-office mandate was making sure employees are set up with the ability to interact.
“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy 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.”
So the five-day-a-week mandate is an effort to foster collaboration seen pre-pandemic, making it easier for teammates to “learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture,” Jassy said.
Jassy said the new mandate will operate like most office environments prior to the pandemic. It will be “understood” if an employee has an exceptional circumstance, like a child who is home sick, a house emergency or time spent on the road meeting with clients or partners.
Amazon did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
