Amazon Plans to Have Fewer Managers, More Days in Office

Amazon plans to reduce the number of managers in each of its organizations and to require employees to work primarily in an office.

The company is making these changes as part of its efforts to “operate like the world’s largest startup,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a message shared with the company’s employees and posted online Monday (Sept. 16).

In the case of managers, Amazon aims to flatten organizations by asking each of its S-teams, or senior leadership teams, to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of the first quarter of 2025, according to the message.

As the company grew its teams over the last several years, it also added managers and more layers than it had before, per the message. This has led to more meetings and more managers reviewing topics before they move forward.

“If we do this work well,” Jassy said of the move to have having fewer managers, “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 wrote.

Amazon began a series of layoffs in November 2022, with Jassy saying at the time that the company had hired rapidly over the previous several years. In January 2023, he said the number of layoffs would amount to more than 18,000.

On the issue of working from an office, Amazon is going to return to the practices it had before the pandemic, according to the message. That means employees being in the office except in “extenuating circumstances” like when their child is sick, there’s an emergency at home, they’re visiting customers or partners, or they need a day or two to finish coding in a more isolated environment, Jassy wrote.

Over the last 15 months, employees have been back in the office at least three days a week, per the message. But now it will no longer be “a given” that they can work remotely two days a week. This change will take effect Jan. 2.

Jassy wrote in the message that working from an office will make Amazon’s teams “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.”

It was reported in July 2023 that Amazon was ramping up its return-to-the-office mandate by requiring employees working remotely or in smaller remote offices to return to the company’s “main hub” locations.