Amazon asks employees to return to offices five days a week | Wilnesh News

Hey team. I wanted to send a note on some of the changes we’ve made to further strengthen our culture and team.

First, in the long run, I’m pleased with the progress we’ve made together. Stores, AWS, and Ads continue to grow on a massive basis, Prime Video continues to expand, and new investment areas like GenAI, Kuiper, Healthcare, and more are booming. As we continue to grow and invent, we also continue to make progress on our cost structure and operating margins, which is not easy to do. Overall, I like the direction we are heading and admire the hard work and ingenuity of our global team.

When I think back to my time at Amazon, I never imagined that I would be with this company for 27 years. My plan (my wife and I agreed on a bar napkin in 1997) was to stay here for a few years and then move back to New York. Part of the reason I stay is unprecedented growth (we were doing $15M in annual revenue the year before I joined and should be well over $600B this year), an undying thirst for invention, and an obsession with improving our customers’ lives that gets better every day. Ease, better, and the associated opportunities these priorities bring. But the biggest reason I still stay here is our culture. Being so customer-focused is an inspiring part of it, but it’s also about the people we work with, the way we collaborate and invent when we’re at our best, our long-term perspective, and the ownership I always feel at every level The ethos I worked on (I started as level 5), the speed with which we made decisions and actions, and the lack of bureaucracy and politics.

Our culture is unique and one of the most critical parts of our 29-year success. But maintaining a strong culture is not a birthright. You have to keep trying. This is quite unusual when you consider the breadth of our businesses, the associated growth rates, the innovation required in each business, and the number of employees we have hired over the past 6-8 years to pursue these goals , extending to even the most powerful cultures. Strengthening our culture remains a top priority for me and the S team. And, I’ve been thinking about this a lot.

We want to operate like the largest startup in the world. This means a passion for continually inventing for clients, a strong sense of urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), a strong sense of ownership, quick decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, and deep collaboration (you need to be timely Join) to invent and solve puzzles with your teammates) 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 and speed of ownership we desire? 2/ Are we ready to invent, collaborate, and connect enough with each other (and our culture) to provide the absolute best service we can to our customers and our business? We think we can do better on both fronts.

On the first topic, we are always looking to hire teammates who are very smart, judgmental, creative, focused on delivery and evangelists. And we always want people who do the actual detail work to take a high level of ownership. As we’ve grown our team as quickly and substantially as we have over the past many years, it’s understandable that we’ve added a lot of managers. Along the way we also added more layers than before. It creates artifacts that we want to change (e.g., pre-meetings for decision-making meetings, longer managers feeling like they need to review a topic before moving forward, initiative owners feeling less like it) They should make recommendations as decisions are made will be made elsewhere, etc.). Most of the decisions we make are two-way, so we want more team members to feel like they can move quickly without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms and layers that create overhead and waste of valuable time.

Therefore, we are asking every S-Team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025. If we do this work well, it will improve our team members’ ability to move quickly, clarify and inspire their sense of ownership, drive decisions closer to the front lines that have the greatest impact on customers (and the business), reduce bureaucracy, and Empowering our organization to make our customers’ lives better and easier every day. We will do this thoughtfully, and our PxT team will work closely with our leaders to grow our organization to achieve these goals in the coming months.

(BTW, I created a “bureaucracy mailbox” for any examples that any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary processes that we can eradicate… to be clear, companies need processes to be Running efficiently and process does not equal bureaucracy, but unnecessary and excessive processes or rules should be pointed out and eliminated.

To address the second issue, which is to better invent, collaborate, and connect enough with each other and our culture to provide the absolute best service to our customers and our business, we decided that we would go back to Arriving at the office looks exactly like it did before the coronavirus outbreak. As we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe the advantages of working together in the office are significant. I’ve explained these benefits before (February 2023 post), but in summary, we’ve found that it’s easier for our team members to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; it’s easier and more effective to collaborate, brainstorm, and invent ;Teaching and learning from each other are more seamless; and teams tend to be better connected. If anything, our belief in these benefits has been reinforced by the fact that we have been back in the office at least three days a week for the past 15 months.

Before the pandemic, not everyone was working in an office five days a week. If you or your kids are sick, if you have some kind of family emergency, if you’re on the road visiting clients or partners, if you need a day or two to get coding done in a more isolated environment, people are working remotely . This is what we understand and will continue to do moving forward. However, before the pandemic, people were not able to work remotely two days a week, and this will not be the case in the future – our expectation is that, under extenuating circumstances (such as those mentioned above), people will be able to work remotely two days a week. office work) or if you have a remote work exception approved by your S Team Leader.

We will also be reinstating designated desk arrangements at locations that were previously organized this way, including U.S. headquarters locations (Puget Sound and Arlington). For locations that had flexible desking arrangements before the pandemic, including much of Europe, we will continue to operate in this way.

We understand that some of our teammates may have arranged their personal lives in such a way that returning to the office five days a week for a sustained period will require some adjustments. To help ensure a smooth transition, we will enable this new expectation on January 2, 2025. Global Real Estate and Facilities (GREF) is developing a plan to accommodate the above desk arrangements and will communicate details as they are finalized.

I want to thank our leaders and support teams in advance for the work they will do to improve our organizational structure over the coming months. For a company of our size and complexity, this work will not be trivial and will test our collective ability to invent and simplify in how we organize and seize the meaningful opportunities we have across all our businesses.

I don’t take it for granted that Amazon has the right culture. I still believe that we are here because we want to make a difference in our customers’ lives, invent on their behalf, and act quickly to solve their problems. I am optimistic that these changes will better help us achieve these goals while strengthening our culture and team effectiveness.

Thanks, Andy