Amazon Web Services CEO doubles down on RTO mandate saying it’s far better for ‘innovation’ and ‘speed of execution’

AWS CEO Matt Garman said teams are more innovative when they work in person.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman reiterated on Monday night why the recently announced return-to-office mandate is right for the company.

At The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event on Monday evening, Garman addressed the policy change, saying that “innovation” and “speed of execution” are better when teams work in person.

“Particularly as we really think about how do we want to disrupt and we want to invent on behalf of our customers, we find that there is no substitution for doing that in person,” Garman said. “Just the creative energy and how fast you’re able to iterate when you’re sitting there writing on a whiteboard or you’re talking to people in the cubicle next to you or you’re running into people that are in a different department, but you see them at the coffee line or whatever it is.”

Garman said those exchanges just don’t happen when employees work remotely. He said Amazon initially tried having employees come in at least three days a week rather than five, but that didn’t work “because everybody picked a different set of three days” to come in.

He also said he told his employees, “If it’s not for you, then that’s okay — you can go and find another company if you want to.”

When asked how many employees might leave, Garman said he did not know but believed most were excited about everyone working in person.

Amazon did not respond to a request for comment from B-17.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced last month that most corporate employees would be required to return to the office five days a week starting in January.

In a meeting transcript from last week previously obtained by B-17, Garman said most of the employees he’d spoken to supported the change. He also said those who didn’t could go work for another company, which he repeated on Monday.

When B17 reached out about Garman’s comments last week, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment but pointed to Jassy’s RTO announcement in September.

B-17 viewed internal messages after the policy was announced, showing that some Amazon employees were unhappy with the change.

“What ever happened to ‘Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer,'” one employee wrote.