AWS CEO says most staff he’s spoken with are ‘excited’ about RTO, leaked transcript shows

AWS CEO addressed employees about its RTO policy in an all-hands meeting.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has said that most of the staff he’s spoken with favor the company’s new five-day return-to-office policy.

The AWS chief told employees on Thursday that remote work makes it hard to innovate and collaborate, and those who disagree with the new policy are welcome to leave the company, according to a transcript of an all-hands meeting obtained by B-17.

Garman addressed the RTO policy introduced by Amazon in September, which has faced strong pushback from some employees.

Most of Amazon’s corporate employees will be required to come into the office five days a week starting in January.

Garman said nine out of 10 Amazon employees he spoke to are “actually quite excited by this change,” adding that there were days when his team “didn’t really accomplish anything” because some people worked remotely.

“When we want to innovate, when we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we’re not in-person,” Garman said. “And so if there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s OK. There are other companies around.”

“I don’t mean that in a bad way,” Garman continued. “There are other places, but at Amazon, we want to be in an environment where we are working together.”

It is Garman’s first official response to Amazon’s new RTO policy and comes after the company received backlash from some employees. One Amazon employee told B-17 that he felt the decision was a “betrayal,” and he plans on “coffee badging” instead of working from the office five days a week.

However, one former Amazon executive told B-17 that the company is right to ask staff to return to the office five days a week because it would help “jump-start growth again.”

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment. Instead, the spokesperson pointed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s previous RTO announcement from September, in which he said the “advantages of being together in the office are significant.” The spokesperson added that the RTO plan is an “effort to strengthen our culture,” and suggesting otherwise is “inaccurate.”

During the all-hands meeting, which was first reported by Reuters, Garman said employees will not always need to be in the office. For example, he said employees are free to attend customer meetings or an external event.

There will still be flexibility to work from home, he added, such as if an employee needs to be in for an appliance to be repaired. He added that the goal is to rebuild the pre-pandemic office culture that had healthy in-person debates and brainstorming sessions.

Garman also stressed how Amazon’s Leadership Principles and culture have helped drive growth and make the company “special” and that those principles can only be experienced in person.

“There’s just a bunch of things that happen in a collaborative environment where we really get creative and can work together,” Garman said.