AWS Tells Staff To Leave If They Don’t Wish To Return To Office

Staff at Amazon Web Services have been handed a blunt ultimatum over a new and controversial return to the office policy.

According to Reuters, AWS CEO Matt Garman at an all-hands meeting defended AWS’s new, controversial 5-day-per-week in-office policy, saying those who do not support it can leave for another company.

AWS’s parent, Amazon, had in August 2023 clamped down on remote working amid some push back against its previous return-to-office mandate, and warned employees that their office presence (or lack thereof) was being recorded.

Disgruntled staff

Amazon had warned at the time that it was tracking the office presence of its US staff and would penalise them for not spending sufficient time in the corporate workplace.

In February 2023, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had issued a return to the office order for the “majority” of the company’s 300,000-strong corporate workforce from 1 May 2023.

Disgruntled Amazon staff reportedly took to internal channels to protest, pointing out that Jassy had stated in September 2022 that Amazon would not follow others in the technology industry by ordering its corporate staff to return to the office, in a post Coronavirus world.

In May 2023 hundreds of Amazon staff walked out in protest of the company’s return-to-office mandate, as well as its layoff of 27,000 staff, and its environmental record.

Return or leave

But AWS staff have be warned to look for jobs at other firms if they don’t like the 5-day-per-week in-office policy.

The new working policy was announced by Amazon CEO Andrew Jassy in a September in a note to employees.

“We’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of Covid,” Jassy was quoted as writing. “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

Now AWS CEO Matt Garman reportedly said nine out of 10 workers he has spoken with support the new policy, which takes effect in January, according to a transcript reviewed by Reuters.

Those who do not wish to work for Amazon in-office five days per week can quit, he suggested.

“If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around,” Garman reportedly said.

“By the way, I don’t mean that in a bad way,” he said, adding “we want to be in an environment where we’re working together.”

“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,” said Garman.

Amazon’s previous office attendance requirement for white-collar workers was three days a week, in line with policies at its tech peers Google and Meta.

At Microsoft, workers are expected to be in the office 50 percent of the time.