Amazon Ends Work from Home: Another ‘Key Thing’ CEO Andy Jassy Stopped in Email to Staff
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is taking aim at bureaucratic bloat in a sweeping overhaul of the e-commerce giant’s corporate culture. In a memo to employees, Jassy announced the elimination of “pre-meetings,” alongside a mandatory return to full-time office work, effective January 2, 2025.
Jassy specifically targeted “pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings” as “artefacts that we’d like to change.” He argued these redundant gatherings slow down decision-making and waste valuable time.
“We want more of our teammates feeling like they can move fast without unnecessary processes, meetings, mechanisms, and layers that create overhead and waste valuable time,” Jassy explained.
To combat bureaucratic excess, Jassy is directing leadership teams to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.” This move aims to flatten the organisational structure and empower employees to make quicker decisions.
Alongside the crackdown on unnecessary meetings, Jassy announced a significant shift in Amazon’s work-from-home policy. “We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” he stated. This change reverses the current three-day in-office requirement, mandating a full five-day office presence for most employees.
Amazon’s CEO cited several benefits of in-person work, including easier collaboration and stronger team connections. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective,” he wrote.
These changes are part of Jassy’s larger vision to maintain Amazon’s innovative edge despite its massive size. “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” he emphasised, highlighting the need for “strong urgency, high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply-connected collaboration.”
Jassy has created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” to further combat bureaucracy. This mailbox is for employees to report unnecessary processes or rules, promising to personally review and act on these submissions.
