Amazon.com Inc. Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy is ordering the e-commerce company’s employees to return to working in the office five days a week beginning in January and said the company will seek to reduce management layers.
Previously, Amazon had required employees to badge in at least three days, depending on the requirements of their team. Amazon’s return to office plans will make exceptions for extenuating circumstances or cases where managers had already approved a fully remote position, Jassy said in a note to employees on Monday.
“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,” Jassy said in the message, which was also posted on Amazon’s corporate blog.
Jassy is also taking aim at bureaucracy and layers of management after Amazon ballooned in size during the last decade. Stories of endless deliberation on memos, unnecessary meetings and layers of approval have become commonplace at a company that fashions itself as a collection of teams charged with operating like startups.
Each major organization within Amazon will be required to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of March 2025, Jassy said. He also announced a bureaucracy tipline for employees to raise concerns about unnecessary processes.
“Keeping your culture strong is not a birthright,” Jassy wrote. “You have to work at it all the time.”
(Updates with details on the announcement beginning in the third paragraph.)