The turnaround in remote work
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy released a memo earlier this month effectively putting an end to remote work at the company by requiring in-person five-day work weeks starting January 2, 2025. This is a definitive step away from Amazon’s hybrid work week that evolved through the COVID pandemic of the last several years, culminating in distributed teams with members across the globe and a 3 day in-person work week, similar to averages we discussed in our March 2024 article on remote work.
Amazon is a hugely important trendsetter in our ongoing look at remote work and its impact on the modern world and corporate ecosystem. While hybrid work policies have been touted as the future for white-collar jobs, Jassy’s statement urges employees the other way, emphasizing the importance of face-to-face interaction in collaboration and moving Amazon’s company culture forward. “When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural cues being communicated,” Jassy said in a 2023 back-to-work memo. Here at Lisa Miller and Associates we couldn’t agree more – as a smaller team we regularly convene so that we can learn, grow, and feed off each other’s ideas, because brain connectivity is at its best in person.
While this move may increase productivity and synergy in the workplace, many have bemoaned the change across LinkedIn, with some calling it “a step backwards” and questioning if this is the breaking point for some Amazon workers who have settled into their current routines. However, Jassy is adamant this is the first step towards cultivating Amazon’s new workplace culture to “operate like the world’s biggest startup,” involving a “passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency…high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness, and frugality.”
To further this goal, he also mentions trimming the fat from the current Amazon managerial team, asking to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Certainly, Amazon’s workforce will feel different after this change, which calls into question the work/home equilibrium we speak of in our remote work writeups, and the balance between employer and employee desires. While much can be achieved leveraging technology through remote work, there simply is no substitute for having people in the office, bouncing ideas off one another. If the whole is more than the sum of its parts, perhaps the parts should be working together in one place.
LMA Newsletter of 9-30-24
