Amazon’s push to get employees back into the office five days a week is boiling down to a rather blunt argument: If staffers don’t like it, they can work elsewhere.
In an all-hands meeting for Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, CEO Matt Garman bluntly told colleagues that if they didn’t like the controversial policy, they should leave.
The Big Tech giant’s push to get employees back to their in-office desks five days a week hasn’t been simple.
In February last year, some 16,000 employees joined a Slack channel and launched a petition to oppose CEO Andy Jassy’s call to return to the office for “the majority of the week.”
In February 2023, that only meant three days a week, but by September 2024, it was increased to mandatory in-office attendance every day of the working week starting from January 2025.
In an internal call this week—first reported by Reuters—Garman doubled down on the decision, saying Amazon didn’t want employees who couldn’t handle being in the office that frequently.
“If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around,” Garman said, per Reuters.
“By the way, I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he continued. He said he wanted staff to be “in an environment where we’re working together.”
Garman said he isn’t seeing enough evidence to support the idea that the Jeff Bezos-founded company is innovating fast enough under a hybrid working model, adding: “When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in-person.”
Given the fact teams were in on three days—and not necessarily the same three days—”we didn’t really accomplish anything, like we didn’t get to work together and learn from each other,” Garman reportedly added.
Amazon did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Popularity problems
According to a transcript of the all-hands seen by CNBC, Garman insisted that of the colleagues he has spoken to, “nine out of ten” are looking forward to the new mandate being enforced.
Perhaps Garman has just been lucky with the people he has spoken to, as staffers posting on social media sites and internal channels have expressed their fury at the goalposts once again changing—impacting their commute and family dynamics.
“Amazon has announced 5 day RTO, which is unfortunate because I’m interested in working for a living, not live-action role playing and virtue signaling,” an Amazon Web Services engineer posted on LinkedIn, with an accompanying #OpenToWork banner signaling their intention to leave the company.
“If you have remote opportunities available, please message me,” the staffer continued. “Nothing is off the table. I’d rather go back to school than work in an office again.”
Tech staffers looking to leave Amazon for a rival face a tough balance, with layoffs sweeping through companies offering a more flexible office-to-hybrid working structure.
Meta, for example, allows its staff to work from home two days a week, and Google has a similar policy.
Microsoft on the other hand allows staff to work as flexibly as they want, with a VP at the company recently telling staffers the policy will stay in place as long as productivity remains high.
Learning principles
Amazon’s culture is very closely linked to its leadership principles, many of which hark back to the days when billionaire entrepreneur Bezos was at the helm.
Current CEO Andy Jassy is still a proponent of the principles, with Garman reportedly adding that teams not being together, in-person full-time is getting in the way of these guiding ideas.
Speaking of the leadership principles, Garman is reported to have said: “You can’t internalize them by reading them on the website, you really have to experience them day-to-day.”
Along with well-known ideas like Amazon’s “customer obsession,” there is the notion of disagree and commit, where individuals voice their opinions but join the general consensus whether or not they agree.
“I don’t know if you guys have tried to disagree via a Chime call,” Garman continued, referring to an internal messaging platform. “It’s very hard.”
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