Amazon orders employees to return to office 5 days a week, warns of corporate restructuring

Amazon is mandating that corporate workers return to the office five days a week, CEO Andy Jassy said in a note on Monday.The return-to-office mandate is a sharp change from its current hybrid policy, which requires employees to work from the office at least three days a week. Amazon employees will have until Jan.2 to switch to the new policy.Amazon will also be streamlining its corporate structure — management positions in particular — to “remove layers and flatten organizations,” Jassy said. The Seattle, Wash.-based company rapidly expanded during the pandemic before Jassy took the helm in 2021 and implemented cost-cutting measures and widespread layoffs.During his tenure, Jassy orchestrated the largest layoffs in Amazon’s 27 years as a public company.As a result of growing the company so quickly, Amazon hired a lot of managers and “added more layers than we had before,” Jassy said.Those layers clogged up the food chain – creating pre-meetings for meetings and a more convoluted chain of command.“So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025,” Jassy wrote.The company has created a “bureaucracy mailbox,” or email alias, dedicated to rooting out unnecessary steps in the company, Jassy said.In addition to tweaking the company’s structure, Jassy said a main focus of the return-to-office mandate was making sure employees are set up with the ability to interact.“We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” Jassy 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.”So the five-day-a-week mandate is an effort to foster co...