Amazon exec says return-to-office opponents can find ‘other companies’

As Amazon’s five-day-a-week return-to-office policy approaches its enforcement date, a company executive is taking a hard line against those who don’t want to comply.

Matt Garman, head of Amazon Web Services, told employees at a town hall meeting Thursday that “there are other companies around” if employees don’t want to return to prepandemic office expectations.

Starting in January, Amazon will require employees to work from the office five days a week, a change from the current three-day-a-week policy that has been in effect since spring 2023.

Garman said Thursday the company’s new policy was important for strengthening Amazon’s culture of innovation and collaboration, and suggested that the current requirement was not doing enough to reach that goal.

“There’s just a bunch of things that happen in a collaborative environment where we really get creative and can work together,” Garman said at the AWS town hall, according to a transcript of the meeting shared with The Seattle Times. “It’s something I’m excited about, and I realize it may not be for everybody.

“If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s OK … There are other places, but at Amazon, we want to be in an environment where we are working together.”

Garman, who took over as head of AWS in June, was echoing similar comments that other Amazon executives made as the company began enforcing its return-to-office mandate last year.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees at an internal meeting in August 2023 that, for those who didn’t want to comply with the return-to-office mandate, " it’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.”

Adam Selipsky, the former head of AWS, told employees the same month that it was “important to have a backbone” and express their point of view, but that the return-to-office policy wasn’t changing. “This is our direction. This is what we’re doing,” he said.

Amazon faced intense pushback from workers shortly after announcing it would require employees to be in the office three days a week in February 2023. Thousands of workers signed a petition asking the company to reconsider and hundreds participated in a walkout protesting the mandate.

With its new policy, Amazon will have one of the most aggressive return-to-office expectations among Seattle’s tech giants and most of the region’s employers. Redmond-based Microsoft has said it won’t follow Amazon’s lead back to the office unless productivity wanes.

Amazon declined to comment on Garman’s remarks at the town hall. A spokesperson pointed back to Jassy’s remarks announcing the new five-day-a-week return, when he told workers “we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

It helps colleagues “learn, model, practice and strengthen our culture,” Jassy said. “If anything, the last 15 months we’ve been back in the office … has strengthened our conviction about the benefits.”

Garman told AWS employees Thursday that 9 out of 10 people he has spoken with are “actually quite excited about this change.”

“There’s a number of reasons for it,” he continued, but “No. 1″ is Amazon’s commitment to its “leadership principles,” a long list of directives that are meant to guide Amazon employees and the culture at the company. Among those principles, Amazon encourages employees to “disagree and commit” and show a “bias for action.”

“These are principles that you just can’t read on the website,” Garman said. “You really have to experience them day to day, and I think that’s one of those things that has to be in person.”

Garman also suggested that Amazon’s current three-day-a-week policy wasn’t working.

Colleagues would miss each other if they came into the office on different days, he said. They weren’t able to work and learn together and Amazon wasn’t able to foster the culture of collaboration it set out to rekindle when it began requiring employees to come back to the office.

Garman reassured employees Thursday that they could leave the office for a meeting with a customer or an event, and could work from home in some circumstances, like needing to let in a technician to repair a broken dryer. If an employee wanted to stay home to work on a coding project, they just had to ask their manager, Garman said.

“You should know that what we really mean by this is we want to have an office environment. It doesn’t mean you can’t stay home,” he said.

Employees, though, were skeptical of that leniency.

In a Slack channel set up to advocate for continued remote work, employees told one another that they thought Garman had the right idea, according to messages shared with The Seattle Times. But in practice, the workers said, they were worried that taking a day at home to work on a project could come back to haunt them for not complying with the new rules.