Even as Indian IT companies are slowly sunsetting their remote work initiatives, global tech giants are following the same path.
Amazon has said that it will end remote work starting next year. Thus far, Amazon employees only had to be in office for three days a week. But from 2nd January 2025, they’ll need to be in office all five days.
“To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to employees. “We continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant..we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another,” he added.
Jassy also wrote about reducing the bureaucratic clutter at Amazon. He said that Amazon would increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. “Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. If we do this work well, it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day,” Jassy said.
Jassy even set up a hotline to help eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy. “I’ve created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out,” he said.
These are major changes, and perhaps brought about by recent changes in the tech landscape. AI threatens to completely upend how the sector looks in a decade, and Amazon has largely been seen to miss the AI boat, in spite of being well positioned to take advantage. Amazon had a big lead in home devices through Amazon Echo, which could’ve benefitted from having a powerful AI built into it, but it hasn’t moved much on that front. Apart from an investment in Anthropic, Amazon hasn’t made major moves in AI. On the AWS front, it’s seeing rivals like Google and Microsoft chip away at its market-share, and in countries like India, its e-commerce operations are threatened by the emergence of newer quick commerce players like Blinkit and Zepto. As such, Amazon needs a bit of a reset, and Jassy’s memo has outlined the ways to achieve it. “We want to operate like the world’s largest startup,” the memo said. It remains to be seen if Amazon’s new initiatives will yield the desired results, but Amazon has joined the growing ranks of companies that seem to be all but done with remote work.