Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, speaks during the CNBC Power Lunch on July 1, 2024.
CNBC
AmazonOn Thursday, the cloud chief delivered a candid message to employees about the company's recently announced five-day term.
Employees who disagree with Amazon's new policy can leave, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said during an all-hands meeting at the company's second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.
“If there are people who just don't function well in this environment and don't want to do it, that's fine, there are other companies around,” Garman said, according to a transcript viewed by CNBC. “At Amazon, we want to work in a collaborative environment, and we believe a collaborative environment is incredibly important to our innovation and culture.”
Amazon has observed that working in the office helps teams collaborate better and work more effectively, a company spokesperson told CNBC.
Garman's comments were previously reported by Reuters.
Amazon announced the new mandate last month. The company's previous stance on returning to work required company employees to be in the office at least three days per week. Employees have until January 2nd to comply with the new policy.
The company is abandoning its pandemic-era remote work policies to keep up with competitors MicrosoftOpenAI and Google in the race to develop generative artificial intelligence. This is one of Garman's main responsibilities, who took over AWS in June after his predecessor Adam Selipsky stepped down from the position.
The move has sparked backlash from some Amazon employees, who say they work just as productively from home or in a hybrid work environment as they do in an office. Others say the mandate places additional burdens on families and caregivers.
About 37,000 employees have joined an internal Slack channel created last year to advocate for remote work and share grievances about the return-to-work mandate, according to a person familiar with the matter.
At the all-hands meeting, Garman said he spoke to employees and “nine out of 10 people are actually pretty excited about this change.” He acknowledged that there will be cases where employees have some flexibility.
“What we really mean by that is that we want to have an office environment,” Garman said, pointing to an example scenario in which an employee wants to work from home one day with the approval of their manager in order to concentrate on their work in a quiet environment to concentrate work.
“That’s fine,” he said.
Garman said the mandate is important for preserving Amazon's culture and “leadership principles,” which are a list of more than a dozen business philosophies designed to guide employees' decisions and goals. He pointed to Amazon's Disagree and Commit principle, which is the idea that employees should respectfully discuss each other and reject each other's ideas. This practice can be particularly difficult to implement with Amazon's Chime video conferencing software, Garman said.
“I don’t know if you guys have tried to object through a Chime call — it’s very hard,” Garman said.
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