heroine has decided to make some changes in the ongoing work from home policy for its employees. As part of the new rules, the tech giant is going to give more freedom to individual teams with regards to calling employees into the office and decisions will be taken by the team at the director level. Directors will decide whether all team members should work remotely or from the office or flexibly from both home and office. Amazon CEO Andy Jassi Wrote about the new rules in an email to employees this week, which we’re laying out here verbatim, courtesy of GeekWire.
“Subject: Updated Guidance on Where We Work”
Dear Amazonian,
I’d like to update you on how we are continuing to develop our thinking on where we operate.
First, it is worth reminding ourselves how challenging and unprecedented these past 20 months have been. We’ve never been this way before, and hope we’ll never find it again. I appreciate and take pride in how customer-centric and mission-driven the Collective team has been. It hasn’t been easy and everything hasn’t gone perfectly, but the impact you have had in tackling this imbalance on the lives of consumers, vendors, developers, enterprises, creators and brands is remarkable.
As we start to think about the future, we’re all asking questions like, “When are we actually going back to the office, what will it actually be like, how will I allocate my time between office and home, As others do, do we need to collaborate and work together individually every day to invent the best, and how do we best build relationships and culture?” We’ve shared some updates on this topic, thinking first that we’ll be back in the office in September 2021, and then by January 2022, with the suggestion that we should all try to be in the office for at least three days. Week. This guidance prompted questions such as, “Who decides which days, whether teams need to be on the same day, are there certain tasks or teams that are more at home versus the office (and vice versa). can work effectively,” and much more. We met several times as a leadership team to discuss these questions, and generally agreed on three things.
First of all, none of us know the definitive answers to these questions, especially long term. Second, in a company of our size, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to how every team works best. And third, we will be in a phase of experimentation, learning and adjustment for some time as we emerge from this pandemic. All of this prompted us to change course a bit.
For our corporate roles, instead of specifying that people do baseline work three days a week in the office, we’re going to leave this decision up to individual teams. This decision will be taken by the team at the director level. We expect that there will be teams that will continue to work mostly remotely, others that will do some combination work remotely and in the office, and still others that decide the clients will be best served when the team is mostly Will work in office. We are not knowingly determining how many days or which days—it is up to the directors to determine with their senior leaders and teams. Decisions should be guided by what will be most effective for our customers; And not surprisingly, we will all continue to be evaluated by how we deliver for customers, regardless of where the work is done.
At this stage, we want most of our people to be close enough to their core team that they can easily go to the office for a meeting within a day’s notice. We also know that many people have found the ability to work remotely from a different location for a few weeks inspiring and re-energizing. We want to support this flexibility and will continue to offer corporate employees who can work effectively away from the office the option to work up to four weeks per year from any location within your country of employment. way away.
As almost all of you are hearing about this change for the first time, and will be curious to know what your team’s plans are going forward, I would ask you to be patient with your leaders as it may help them. It will take a few weeks to develop and communicate your plan. We anticipate that you will hear about these specific plans from our leaders before January 3rd, which is the date we previously set for people to return to office at least three days a week.
I’d also like to recognize our colleagues in Amazon’s fulfillment and transportation divisions whose roles are not as flexible as most of our corporate roles. The work of these teams is vital to communities around the world (and to the company’s success), and the world has relied on them to deliver products to their doorsteps since the start of the pandemic. There are also other types of roles, such as those working in our AWS datacenters, physical stores, and those designing, developing, and testing new equipment that doesn’t have the facilities to work remotely. I would like to thank these fellows for their passion, commitment and continued dedication. It is greatly appreciated.
As mentioned earlier, these are unusual times and we are all learning together what is the best way to work together to make customers’ lives easier and better every day. And with this happening so early in our mission, with so much invention and change ahead of us, you can bet that we’ll continue to adjust as we continue to learn what makes the most sense for our customers and teams. .
Thank you for your continued hard work.
-Andy”
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