Amazon requires workers to return to the office five days a week

Hey team. I wanted to send a note about some changes to strengthen our culture and teams.

First, for perspective, I feel good about the progress we are making together. Stores, AWS, and advertising continue to grow to a very large base, Prime Video continues to expand, and new investment areas such as GenAI, Kuiper, Healthcare, and more are developing nicely. And at the same time we're growing and innovating, we're continuing to make progress on our cost structure and operating margins, which is not easy to do. Overall, I like the direction we're headed and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams worldwide.

When I think about my time at Amazon, I never thought I would be with the company for 27 years. My plan (which my wife and I agreed on on a bar napkin in 1997) was to stay here for a few years and move back to NYC. Part of why I've stayed is the phenomenal growth (the year before I joined we had $15M in annual revenue—this year should be north of $600B), the perpetual hunger for innovation, the obsession with making customers' lives easier and better every day, and these priorities. opportunities. But, the biggest reason I'm still here is our culture. Being customer focused is an inspiring part of it, but it's the people we work with, the way we collaborate and innovate when we're at our best, our long-term perspective, the ownership that I've always felt at every level I've worked at (I'm a Level 5 as started), the speed with which we make decisions and move forward, and the lack of bureaucracy and politics.

Our culture is unique, and it has been one of the most important parts of our success in our first 29 years. But, keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time. When you consider the breadth of our businesses, their relative growth rates, the innovation required in each of them, and the number of people we've hired over the past 6-8 years to pursue these efforts, it's quite unusual—and even expanding. The most powerful of cultures. Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for the S-Team and myself. And, I think about it all the time.

We want to act like the biggest startup in the world. This means having a passion for continuous innovation for customers, strong urgency (for most large opportunities, it's a race!), high ownership, rapid decision-making, leanness and frugality, deeply connected collaboration (you have to be joined at the hip to invent hard problems and with your teammates when solving), and a shared commitment to each other.

Two areas that the S-Team and I have been thinking about over the past few months are: 1/ Do we have the right organizational structure to drive the level of ownership and momentum we desire? 2/ Are we set up to innovate, collaborate and connect sufficiently with each other (and our culture) to deliver the best for customers and the best for business? We think we can be good at both.

First of all, we have always tried to hire very smart, highly judgmental, innovative, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we always want people doing real detail work to get high ownership. As we have grown our teams rapidly and substantially over the past several years, we have understandably added a lot of managers. In the process, we've added more layers than ever before. This has created patterns that we want to change (e.g., pre-meetings for decision meetings, a long line of managers who feel they need to review an issue before moving forward, initiative owners feeling less recommended because decisions are being made elsewhere. will, etc.). Most of the decisions we make are two-way doors, and therefore, we want more of our teammates to move quickly without creating unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms and layers that waste valuable time.

So, we're asking every s-team organization to increase the ratio of managers to individual contributors by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and make organizations more flat than they are today If we do this well, it will increase our teammates' ability to move faster, articulate and stimulate their sense of ownership, move decision-making closer to the front lines where it affects customers (and the business) most, reduce bureaucracy, and improve day-to-day Strengthen our organization's ability to make customers' lives better and easier. We will do this thoughtfully, and our PxT team will work closely with our leaders to evolve our organizations to achieve these goals in the coming months.

[By the way, I’ve created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out…to be clear, companies need process to run effectively, and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive process or rules should be called out and extinguished. I will read these emails and action them accordingly.]

To address the second issue of being better set up to innovate, collaborate and connect with each other and our culture to deliver the best for customers and businesses, we decided we were going to go back to the way we had offices before covid started. When we look back over the past five years, we believe the benefits of co-working in the office are significant. I've explained these benefits previously (February 2023 post), but in summary, we've noticed that it's easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and reinforce our culture; Collaborating, brainstorming and innovating is easier and more effective; Teaching and learning from each other is more seamless; And, teams are better connected to each other. If anything, the last 15 months we've been back in the office at least three days a week has reinforced our conviction about the benefits.

Before the pandemic, not everyone was in the office five days a week, every week. If you or your child is sick, if you have a home emergency, if you're on the road visiting customers or partners, if you need a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, people work remotely. It's understood, and will move along. But, before the pandemic, it wasn't a given that people could work remotely two days a week, and that will be true moving forward—our expectation is that people will stay in the office outside of exhausting situations (like those mentioned above) or if you already have yours. A remote work exception is permitted through the S-Team Leader.

We will be bringing back assigned desk systems to locations previously organized that way, including the US headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington). We will continue to operate where the agile desk system was in place before the pandemic, including much of Europe.

We understand that some of our teammates may have their personal lives set up in such a way that returning to the office consistently five days per week will require some adjustments. To help ensure a smooth transition, we are going to activate this new expectation on January 2, 2025. Global Real Estate and Facilities (GREF) is working on a plan to adjust the desk arrangements mentioned above and will communicate the details as they are. final

I want to thank our leaders and support teams in advance for the work they will do in the coming months to improve their organizational structure. With a company of our size and complexity, the task will not be trivial and it will test our collective ability to innovate and simplify when it comes to how we organize and pursue meaningful opportunities across our businesses.

Having the right culture at Amazon is something I don't take for granted. I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers' lives, innovate for them and move faster to solve their problems. I am optimistic that these changes will better help us meet these goals while strengthening our culture and the effectiveness of our team.

Thanks, Andy