(Bloomberg) — Amazon.com Inc.’s controversial decision to bring corporate employees back to the office full-time reflects executives’ concerns that recent recruits don’t understand the company’s unique culture.
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Last month, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy surprised employees with a memo ordering them to start reporting to their desks five days a week, beginning in January. Amazon currently lets many of them work from home two days a week.
The return-to-office edict stunned many of the company’s 350,000-plus corporate workers and renewed a heated debate in the tech industry about employee perks and the value of in-person work. Amazon employees and pundits wondered if this was Jassy’s way of further thinning the ranks following a series of layoffs in recent years. After all, the CEO also expressed his intention to reduce management layers in an effort to cut through bureaucracy he said was slowing Amazon down.
But the senior leadership made the change, at least in part, because they believed the next generation of workers was being left behind rather than taught the Amazon way, according to three people familiar with the deliberations. Jassy mentioned the word “culture” a dozen times in his memo. “Keeping your culture strong is not a birthright,” he wrote. “You have to work at it all the time.”
Brad Glasser, an Amazon spokesperson, declined to comment beyond Jassy’s memo.
Amazon, which sees itself as a collection of teams operating like startups, has long acknowledged its culture may seem peculiar to outsiders. Employees pitching new ideas are expected to write detailed memos and avoid slide decks. There’s a strong preference for sharp analysis of data and trends, and plenty of tolerance for frank and heated debate.
The e-commerce and cloud computing giant is also a famously tough environment. Employees are expected to work long, hard and smart, as founder Jeff Bezos put it to the company’s first recruits. Aggressive deadlines are common, as are late-night laptop sessions for many employees.
Jassy, who started at Amazon out of business school in 1997, is a product of and advocate for those approaches, colleagues say. Since succeeding Bezos three years ago, he’s been a one-man ambassador for the Amazon culture, speaking frequently to employee groups and even cutting videos in which he expounds on each of Amazon’s sacrosanct leadership principles.
During the pandemic, Amazon doubled its headcount and dropped requirements that recruits be physically located in a major hub with their team. Executives have since mused openly that many new recruits, especially fresh grads new to the workforce, are missing elements of the company’s culture that can’t be effectively conveyed in videoconferences or chat windows, according to the people, who requested anonymity to discuss an internal matter.
“Culture is a very important part of how we go and do the work, and how we have maintained the innovation and pace of what we do for the last 25 years,” Amazon Web Services chief Matt Garman said at a press event last week, when asked about the company’s return-to-office plans. “And that’s really hard to communicate, really hard to teach to new employees and really hard to maintain when you’re over a video call.”
Mindful that the new schedule would be controversial, the senior leadership spent weeks weighing the pros and cons, according to two of the people. The company denies the policy was designed to push workers out.
But it’s doubtful the leadership’s arguments will mollify employees. Internal chat rooms focused on return-to-office issues lit up after Jassy sent his memo. In internal surveys, workers expressed dissatisfaction and pressed the company to reconsider. Some Amazonians have already resigned, and others are seeking work elsewhere. The last time Amazon ordered employees back to the office, it sparked a walkout at the company’s Seattle headquarters. It’s unclear whether they’ll make a similar attempt again.
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