The months-long controversy waging at Amazon over its aggressive return-to-office mandate apparently has CEO Andy Jassy losing patience with defending it.
In a "fishbowl" meeting earlier this month — Amazon's name for an internal fireside chat — Jassy sidestepped questions asking for the data that drove his decision. Amazon is famously a data-driven organization, and yet, he explained that coming back to the office was a "judgement" call. And if employees didn't like it, they could leave the company, Jassy said, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by Insider.
"It's past the time to disagree and commit," he said. "And if you can't disagree and commit, I also understand that, but it's probably not going to work out for you at Amazon because we are going back to the office at least three days a week, and it's not right for all of our teammates to be in three days a week and for people to refuse to do so."
Amazon has been slowly ramping up the rhetoric and the consequences for those struggling to comply with an order to come into their assigned Amazon office three days a week. As Insider has previously reported, last month the company instituted a policy that said any employee that doesn't comply with this, and has not obtained a rare exception, will be forced into a "voluntary resignation." This came after an internal petition opposing the RTO, signed by roughly 30,000 employees, was rejected by the company.
During the Fishbowl conversation, Jassy also argued Amazon didn't use any compelling data when it first allowed remote work during the pandemic. He added that he spoke to 6o to 80 CEOs of other companies about remote work, and "virtually all of them" preferred bringing employees back to the office, he said.
And now, using a phrase from Amazon's famous leadership principals, the boss is telling employees that the time to ask for justifications, or complain about it, is over.
Amazon's spokesperson didn't provide a comment for this story.
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