Amazon Web Services
CEO
Matt Garman
said he does not know how many employees might leave the company when its mandatory five-day return-to-office policy takes effect in January, though he believes most staff support the change.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal's Tech Live event on Monday evening, Garman addressed concerns about potential
employee departures
, telling staff, "If it's not for you, then that's okay — you can go and find another company if you want to."
9 Out of 10 Amazon employees, "excited" to come back to the office, says AWS CEO
The
AWS
chief has consistently maintained that approximately nine out of ten Amazon employees he's spoken with are "actually quite excited by this change," according to both his recent public comments and an internal all-hands meeting transcript from last week.
Garman defended the stricter in-office policy by emphasising its benefits for innovation and execution speed. "Particularly as we really think about how do we want to disrupt and we want to invent on behalf of our customers, we find that there is no substitution for doing that in person," he said at the WSJ event.
AWS CEO tells the advantages of working out of the office
He highlighted the advantages of spontaneous workplace interactions, such as "writing on a whiteboard or you're talking to people in the cubicle next to you or you're running into people that are in a different department, but you see them at the coffee line." These exchanges, Garman noted, don't occur in remote work settings.
The company's previous attempt at a three-day office requirement proved unsuccessful because "everybody picked a different set of three days" to come in, according to Garman.
When Business Insider reached out regarding Garman's comments last week, an Amazon spokesperson declined to comment but referenced CEO Andy Jassy's September RTO announcement. The new policy positions Amazon as taking a stricter stance on office attendance compared to other major tech companies like Google, Meta, and Microsoft, which maintain two to three-day in-office policies.
Internal messages reviewed by Business Insider showed some employee dissatisfaction with the change, with one worker questioning Amazon's commitment to being "Earth's Best Employer."
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