Amazon is expecting employees to start working from the office, the same way they did before the COVID-19 pandemic popularized remote work across American corporations.
“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” the memo read.
This new requirement tightens a policy issued in February 2023, in which Jassy demanded that corporate staffers spend at least three days a week in the office.
“If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office at least three days a week has strengthened our conviction about the benefits,” Jassy said, adding that he believes in-person work is better for communication, innovation, and building and strengthening company culture.
In another major shift, Amazon plans to streamline its corporate structure by reducing the number of managers. The goal, according to Jassy, is for each S-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors—employees who typically don’t manage others—to managers by at least 15 percent by the end of the first quarter of 2025.
“Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today,” Jassy said, noting that the online retail giant added many managers as it rapidly expanded its workforce during the pandemic.
By the end of 2023, Amazon employed over 1.53 million people, including its vast army of warehouse workers, a slight decrease from the previous year.
“We want more of our teammates to feel they can move quickly without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms, and layers that create overhead and waste valuable time,” wrote Jassy, who has implemented a series of cost-cutting measures since succeeding Jeff Bezos as the company’s chief executive.
To better identify and eliminate unnecessary processes or excessive rules within the company, Jassy encouraged employees to use a “bureaucracy mailbox,” a dedicated email alias, to report any inefficiencies they encounter. He promised to personally read these emails and take appropriate action.
Jassy described those decisions as part of a broader effort to “operate like the world’s largest startup,” with in-person collaboration, simplified decision-making, fewer layers of management, and “a shared commitment to each other.”
Amazon has now joined the ranks of high-profile companies rolling back pandemic-era remote work policies, emphasizing the importance of in-person connections with coworkers and customers.
In January, UPS required its non-operations employees to return to the office full-time. Boeing, too, has mandated five-day in-office attendance for much of its corporate workforce.
