Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ends Work From Home, staff to return to office from January

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” said the memo.

E-tail major and cloud services company Amazon Inc's CEO Andy Jassy said in a memo on September 16 that he is implementing measures to streamline the company, including reducing management layers and requiring employees to return to the office five days a week starting January.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” said the memo.

Jassy said exceptions sickness or emergencies will be made, added, “before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward.”

In his note, Jassy 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.”

CEO Jassy's memo added that the by March 2025, each major division within the company must improve the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%. Jassy also introduced a 'bureaucracy tipline', allowing employees to report unnecessary procedures or inefficiencies.

"We want to operate like the world’s largest startup," he said in the memo, which was also posted on Amazon’s corporate blog. The memo goes on to say, "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."

"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 wrote.