Amazon CEO Andy Jassy warns staff who refuse to work in the office at least three days a week ‘it’s probably not going to work out for you’

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has said that company employees who decide to defy his directive to return to the office at least three days a week may be best placed to leave the company altogether.

At a recent “fishbowl” meeting, Jassy expressed frustration that employees were not taking his return-to-office policy seriously.

The CEO’s comments are taken from a recording of the meeting by Insider.

Although he didn’t share it specific data where he pushed for an employee return to the office, he described it as a “judgment” call.

Jassy then suggested how employees, if they disagreed with his decision, might want to work completely differently.

“It’s past the time to disagree and commit.” Jassy said during the call, noting that he believes it is no longer feasible for the entire team to work remotely, with some choosing not to.

“And if you can’t agree and commit, I understand that too, but it’s probably not going to work with Amazon, because we’re going back to the office at least three days a week, and that’s not for everyone. that our teammates have to be there three days a week and people refuse to do that,” said 55-year-old Jassy.

“Those were judgment decisions made by our leadership team,” Jassy continued. “And that’s what happened here. As a leadership team, we have decided that we will be better for the customers and for our business at the office.”

Jassy said he talked to 60 to 80 other CEOs and found that “almost all of them” were in favor of workers returning to the office.

Among other things, he said senior management watched how staff performed and talked to leaders at other companies. He said they found that employees tended to be more personally engaged and more likely to collaborate.

Last month, Amazon confirmed that it is requiring certain company employees to move to different cities as part of its office return plan to work from central “hub” offices.

Those who refuse to move and work out of Amazon’s headquarters were given the option of either seeking a new internal position or leaving the company through “voluntary redundancy.”

Previously, team leaders were allowed to decide for themselves how their loads worked.

Earlier this year, about 30,000 workers signed a petition asking Jassy to withdraw the guideline for most workers to work at least three days a week on construction sites.

There was also a protest outside the headquarters in May. The employees expressed disappointment with the pace of the company’s efforts to reduce its carbon footprint – ‘Emissions are rising, time to act’ – and urged Amazon to return authority to team leaders when it comes to to the workplace.

Amazon began its “back to the office” policy on May 1, based on observations of what it believes worked best during the pandemic.

Jassy said personal involvement usually resulted in greater employee engagement and better collaboration.

Amazon, which has more than 1.5 million employees worldwide, also announced the layoffs of 27,000 employees earlier this year as part of a broader cost-cutting initiative.

The return-to-office order follows widespread cost-cutting at Amazon, which has seen layoffs in advertising, human resources, gaming, retail, appliances and Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, hit.

Like other tech companies, including Facebook parent Meta and Google parent Alphabet, Amazon ramped up its workforce during the pandemic to meet demand from homebound Americans who increasingly shopped online to protect themselves from the virus.

Amazon’s workforce, in warehouses and offices, has doubled in about two years to more than 1.6 million. But demand slowed as the worst of the pandemic eased.

The company began pausing or canceling warehouse expansion plans last year and has cut 27,000 jobs since November.

Other tech companies are also calling their employees back to the office after the pandemic forced people to work from home.

Senior leaders at Apple told staff in August to return to the office at least three days a week, with CEO Tim Cook saying it was intended to restore “in-person collaboration.”

Google informed its employees in the San Francisco Bay Area and “several other U.S. locations” to return to the office for a minimum of three days a week starting in April 2022.

While Meta stopped offering remote work on new job postings as a way to deviate from remote work.

And billionaire Elon Musk forced Twitter employees in November to ban remote work and require employees to be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours shortly after he took over the company.

Uber recently vacated its 285,000-square-foot office in San Francisco as staff insist on working from home.

Even the CEO of Zoom, one of the main beneficiaries of the remote work revolution in the Covid lockdown era, wants his employees to come over at least two days a week and tell staff at a company-wide meeting that they simply unable to have a good conversation. only through remote meetings.

Zoom, the San Jose technology company that transformed office work during the Covid-19 pandemic, has now mandated that every employee living within 50 miles of a Zoom office be on site at least 40 percent of the time must clock in.

“You come up with great ideas a lot,” said Zoom CEO Eric Yuan at the Aug. 3 company meeting, “but when we’re all on Zoom, it’s really hard.”

“We don’t debate well,” Yuan explained, “because everyone tends to be really friendly when you join a Zoom call.”

“In our early days, we all knew each other,” Yuan said in the audio of the Aug. 3 meeting, which was leaked to Insider.

But as the company has scaled up to accommodate its growing role in the global office culture, Yuan says Zoom’s camaraderie among executives has eroded, both through the isolation of remote working and the expansion of their workforce.

“We’ve taken on so many new ‘Zoomies’ in recent years that it’s very difficult to build trust,” explains Yuan.

“Trust is the basis for everything,” he added. “Without confidence, we will be slow.”