A senior Amazon executive has suggested that staff who dislike the company’s new five-day-a-week office work policy should resign.
The head of the technology company’s cloud computing business said in an internal meeting that if employees did not support the change they could look for jobs elsewhere, according to a transcript. reviewed by Reuters.
Matt Garman, chief executive of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, said nine in 10 workers he had spoken to supported the policy, which is effective for all office staff starting Jan. 2, except those in exceptional circumstances.
He said anyone dissatisfied with the withdrawal of home working should leave. “If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s fine, there are other companies,” Garman said, in comments reported by Reuters.
“By the way, I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he said, adding: “We want to be in an environment where we work together. When we really want to innovate interesting products, I haven’t seen the ability to do that when we’re not in person.”
The new workplace policy was announced by Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy in a memo to employees in September. He wrote: “We have decided that we will return to being in the office as we were before Covid struck. As we look back over the past five years, we continue to believe that the benefits of being together in the office are significant.”
Amazon employs 1.5 million people worldwide, including part-time workers. Its previous office attendance requirement for white-collar workers was three days a week, in line with the policies of tech peers Google and Meta. At Microsoft, workers are expected to be in the office 50% of the time.
Garman said we “didn’t really achieve anything” under the three-day policy because different work patterns meant we “were not able to work together and learn from each other.”
He added that Amazon’s leadership principles, which lay out how employees should behave toward each other, were difficult to follow under a three-day-a-week policy. He said the “disagree and compromise” principle, under which employees are “obliged to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree”, was difficult to implement in Amazon’s internal communications system, Chime.
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“I don’t know if you guys have tried to disagree on a Chime call,” he said. “It’s very difficult.”
Amazon declined to comment.