Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is bringing in several changes to the company’s corporate structure by ordering employees to return to the office five days a week, and reducing the layers of middle management to more efficiently manage decision making.
In a memo to employees on Monday, Jassy called for employees to work from the office all five days a week, as was the case prior to the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another.
“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,” said Jassy.
He added that the new rule to work five days a week from the office will be implemented from January 2, 2025.
Amazon had approximately 350,000 office workers on the eve of its largest-ever layoffs, which began in late 2022. Starting from the end of 2022 and continuing through last year, Amazon cut nearly 27,000 jobs across nearly every area of the company.
Apart from employees being ordered back full-time to the office, Jassy has also dealt with the matter of flattening the organisation to reduce the number of managers in the middle.
Explaining his reasoning behind the decision, he cited “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.”
Now, each major organization 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 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.
“Keeping your culture strong is not a birthright,” Jassy added. “You have to work at it all the time.”
