Quit if you don’t like our office-working policy, Amazon executive suggests

A senior Amazon executive has suggested that staff who do not like the company’s new five-days-a-week office-working policy should quit.

The head of the tech company’s cloud computing business told an internal meeting that if employees did not support the change they could look for a job elsewhere, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.

Matt Garman, chief executive of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) unit, said nine out of 10 workers he had spoken to supported the policy, which is effective for all office-based staff from 2 January, barring those with exceptional circumstances.

Nevertheless, he indicated that anyone unhappy with the retreat from home-working should leave.

“If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s OK, there are other companies around,” said Garman, in the 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’re working together. When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in-person.”

The new working policy was announced by Amazon’s chief executive, Andrew Jassy, in a September in a note to employees. He wrote: “We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

Amazon employs 1.5 million people globally, including part-time workers. Its previous office attendance requirement for white-collar workers was three days a week, in line with policies at 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 accomplish anything” under the three-day policy because different working patterns meant “we didn’t get to work together and learn from each other”.

He added that Amazon’s leadership principles, which set out how employees should behave with one another, were difficult to follow with a three-day-a-week policy. He said the “disagree and commit” principle, where employees are “obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree”, was difficult to implement over Amazon’s internal communications system, Chime.

“I don’t know if you guys have tried to disagree via a Chime call,” he said. “It’s very hard.”

Amazon declined to comment.