Steve Jurvetsons (2016)
Amazon is raising the stakes around its return-to-office policy with CEO Andy Jassy clamping down on opposition. Jassy told employees that it’s “past the time to disagree and commit” to the policy, mandating that corporate employees come into the office three days a week.
Why it matters: The policy, which was announced in February and put into place in May, has not been received fondly by every employee. In fact, many have been pushing back against it. Hundreds of Amazon employees have protested the new policy at the company’s Seattle headquarters upon its rollout. However, that’s all about to change.
- At the time of the protest, an internal Slack channel of 33,000 members supporting remote work emerged. Although the channel has dissolved, there’s still a chunk of Amazon’s 1.4 million employees who disagree with the company’s policy.
- Jassy spoke to the company’s senior executives earlier this year about what worked during the pandemic and what did not, concluding that employees had a tendency to collaborate more easily and be more engaged in person.
- Amazon has also been requiring that some workers from its smaller offices move to the main offices in bigger cities to work in person, a policy which began in July, according to various media reports.
- The message is clear with Jassy saying, “if you can’t disagree and commit, it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon,” and that it isn’t okay for some employees to refuse to come into the office while others work in person three days a week.
