- Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is pushing to eliminate bureaucracy and flatten the company’s structure, aiming to boost efficiency and give more ownership to individual contributors. The CEO said he has made hundreds of changes based on employee feedback on company red tape.
Andy Jassy is on a mission to eliminate “bureaucracy” at Amazon. In his annual letter to shareholders, the CEO said he asked employees to send examples of red tape at the company and received almost 1,000 responses.
“Builders hate bureaucracy. It slows them down, frustrates them, and keeps them from doing what they came here to do. As leaders, we don’t always see the red tape buried deep in our organizations, but we can sure as heck eliminate it when we do,” he wrote.
Jassy said Amazon had already made over 375 changes based on this feedback. “We need to move fast, and we are committed to rooting out bureaucracy that ties up time and dispirits our teammates,” he added.
Fortune has contacted Amazon to ask what changes they have made but has yet to receive a response.
The CEO also encouraged the company to operate like a “startup,” emphasizing there was a difference between process and bureaucracy.
“When you’re running something at scale, you need mechanisms to deliver the right experience and constant improvement for customers. However, as companies grow and add more managers, unneeded processes get layered on that add little value,” he said.
It’s the first time Jassy has criticized middle managers and encouraged a “flatter” company structure.
Last September, the Amazon CEO said that he wanted to “increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.” He’s since said that Amazon has already surpassed the marker and that the change will free up mobility across the company.
“It’s going to allow us, for the people that are doing the work, they’re gonna have more ownership and they’re going to be able to move more quickly,” Jassy said in March.
Big Tech companies are looking to flatten company structures
Compressing company hierarchies has been a wider trend across the tech industry.
Since 2023, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been advocating for a “flatter” company structure, arguing that asking middle managers to become individual contributors would increase efficiency across the board.
Google also laid off some of its middle management positions in 2023, telling employees it would be harder to get into those roles moving forward.
Last year, Shopify also announced it was “flattening” its organization structure to incentivize more employees to become individual contributors.
