On Wednesday, 523 employees in the Amazon Web Services division sent its chief executive, Matt Garman, an open letter detailing their frustration with the new policy. 

“Our time working remotely during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic proved that we are effective, creative, and successful without being primarily in-person, and to take no lessons from that experience would be extremely disappointing, because Amazon is and always will be a global company,” the open letter reads. 

In September, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that as of January 2025, employees would have to return to the office five days a week. Amazon employees are currently expected to be in the office three days a week. The move set off a new wave of unrest at Amazon. Employees had previously voiced their displeasure with each new policy that required more days in the office through walkouts, open letters, and threatening to quit.  

Jassy and Amazon’s senior leadership regularly cite the need to return to the office in order to increase collaboration and innovation. Executives have reiterated their belief that these tasks are better performed via in-person work than remote work. 

The letter came as a response to comments Garman made to that effect during an all-hands meeting earlier this month. 

“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 in comments reported by Business Insider. “There is just no substitute for getting up on a whiteboard and walking through what’s going on, having a brainstorm and stopping in the cubicle next to you.”

The research on whether remote or in-person work is better for a company is rather split. There is no doubt that flexible work is a desirable perk that helps attract talent, retain existing employees, and improve overall morale. However, the distance and lack of spontaneity caused by team members being remote does indeed inhibit collaboration and innovation, according to a July study published in Nature. 

The question then becomes how to balance these two competing realities. An RTO policy that increases innovation, but leads to a staff exodus, would be self-defeating, the open letter argues.

“Return-to-office mandates tend to push out more senior and tenured employees across the board, who may be best poised to participate in and give insight into these whiteboarding and brainstorming sessions you refer to,” the letter reads. 

Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said the company was notifying employees now so that they would have time to adjust to the transition in the new year. Callahan cited several resources meant to ease the process such as commuter benefits and free memberships to services that offer caregivers.  

Amazon’s fraying culture

Garman said many of the employees he’d spoken with were in favor of returning to the office five days a week. During the meeting, Garman told staff “nine out of 10 employees” he’d spoken with were “actually quite excited by this change.” 

The letter strongly criticized Garman’s sentiments for being out of step with Amazon’s company culture. 

“Not only are these comments inconsistent with the experiences of many employees, they indicate an outright abdication of AWS’ role as one of the world’s most innovative companies and a leader in our industry,” the letter reads. 

The changing nature of Amazon’s culture has been a growing topic at the company and a source of consternation among staff. Amazon was once hailed as the paragon of a rock-solid corporate culture that had both universal buy-in from employees and the ability to deliver results. Some, both within the company and outside it, feel the culture is straying from its foundation of being detail-oriented and making data-driven decisions.

Returning to the office full-time is a way to help rectify that issue, according to Jassy. “We’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture” when they’re together in the office, Jassy wrote in his September memo outlining the plan. 

The decision to implement the new RTO policy failed to live up to Amazon’s culture because it wasn’t sufficiently data-driven, according to the letter. 

“Amazon claims to be a data-driven company, and statements which rely on ‘we believe’ and ‘I feel,’ or exclaim how many people are excited about something to justify themselves, fail to achieve our standard of decision-making for critical issues that impact hundreds of thousands of the company’s employees and its customers,” signatories of the letter wrote.  

Employees wrote in the letter that they were “appalled” by the perceived lack of data used to inform the RTO rules. 

“Your statements indicate that either you have not collected enough data to support your position but are moving ahead anyways, or you have seen the data which indicates otherwise and are choosing to ignore it, or you have motivations to support this policy which you are not being forthcoming about with those it impacts,” the letter continued.