Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wants his company to be the “world’s largest startup,” and he’s turning to employees to help slash the red tape that’s holding it back.
Speaking at Amazon’s conference for third-party sellers this week, Jassy noted the e-commerce giant set up a “no bureaucracy email alias” for employees to report slow processes and needless rules. In the past year, the de facto tip-line received more than 1,500 reports, Jassy said, according to remarks at Amazon’s annual conference for third-party sellers in Seattle reported by CNBC, and he said the company has changed about 455 processes thanks to the effort.
Near the end of the Jeff Bezos era, Amazon expanded its operations in increasingly varied product categories such as healthcare and physical retail, with an increasingly giant workforce, absorbing a great deal of bureaucracy along the way. But soon after Jassy took the helm, Amazon’s stock plummeted, reaching a low of about $84 per share near the end of 2022, compared to $230 per share today. After admitting the company have been prone to “overbuilding” during the pandemic, Jassy changed gears.
Since then, in part as a response to Wall Street concerns, the Amazon CEO has installed flatter leadership structures and a higher number of workers per manager. While Bezos’s later years as CEO were defined by the breadth of Amazon’s offerings, Jassy is now aligning the company with an earlier Bezos legacy, the “Day 1” mentality, which encourages customer centric thinking and bold innovation, as if each day was the first in Amazon history.
Jassy’s latest tipline project and his return to a “Day 1” mentality are meant to tackle what he calls hidden bureaucracy.
“I would say bureaucracy is really anathema to startups and to entrepreneurial organizations,” Jassy said. “As you get larger, it’s really easy to accumulate bureaucracy—a lot of bureaucracy that you may not see.”
A spokesperson for Amazon did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment.
Jassy took the helm at Amazon from founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, and under his leadership, Amazon has laid off more than 27,000 corporate employees. He’s also cut into some Bezos-era projects, such as its foray into retail with Amazon Books, its effort to put Alexa devices into offices, and its online file storage product Amazon Drive.
The CEO has also raised his expectations for remaining employees. In January, Amazon instituted a five-day, in-office policy, a change from previous years where managers had the final say on remote work. In June, the Amazon boss published a memo predicting that progress in AI will lead to “efficiency gains” and an even smaller corporate workforce.
Jassy is the latest executive changing the tone of tech from growth-at-all-costs to efficiency and profitability, an effort that arguably began with Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his 2023 “year of efficiency.”Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce have all cut thousands of jobs in recent years.
Over the past five years, Amazon’s stock is up more than 50%, but employees have complained about his recent messaging. Internally, some saw Jassy’s June AI memo as a blow to employee morale and lamented the tone of the CEO’s message which seemed to suggest they are expendable, Business Insider reported.
