Amazon has officially bid adieu to the hybrid work model. In an elaborately worded memo, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy instructed his corporate workforce to start working from the office five days a week, starting January 2, 2025.
In an attempt to strengthen and revive its corporate culture, Amazon has put an end to the three-day work-from-home structure. In a pre-pandemic world, “it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week,” said Jassy in the memo. But after surviving such trying times, Amazon aims to simplify its corporate structure by having fewer managers to “remove layers and flatten organizations,” according to Jassy. In the memo, Jassy detailed that every S-team organization must aim to boost the proportion of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.
Known for implementing historic cost cuts at Amazon, Jassy facilitated the largest layoffs at the public company in the last 27 years. In the lengthy corporate memo, Jassy emphasized that Amazon will now run as the “world’s largest startup.” This will translate into “having a passion for constantly inventing for customers, strong urgency (for most big opportunities, it’s a race!), high ownership, fast decision-making, scrappiness and frugality, deeply connected collaboration (you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems), and a shared commitment to each other.”
Following this announcement, Amazon shares experienced a slight decline.