Open Letter to Andy Jassy
My Thoughts on Amazon RTO
NOTE: Here is an open letter to Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon, after he sent an email to all employees indicating that the company would require employees to be back in the office 5 days a week.
Hi Andy,
We don’t know each other, although with your high-profile job I certainly have read a lot about you and am sure you have read nothing about me. My first reading of your letter generated a genuine rage in me (I’m sorry to say that internal anger is my common first response). Upon reflection, I still find it infuriating, but I realized my anger could be put to better use. I want to challenge your thinking and possibly show you why your thoughts may not be well received among some of your employees. They won’t tell you this – employees know telling the truth like this is a career limiting move.
“Why rage?” you may ask. I train and coach managers. I know the impact that managers and organizations have on the health (mental and physical) of the employee. Overproduced corporate communications, like yours, damages the relationships among employees, managers, and employers. I know your Comms team will tell you differently, so I want to share with you what employees read in those carefully crafted lines.
Caveat: I do not know any Amazon employees and I’ve talked with no one. I make these statements from having read similar CEO letters and talked with thousands of employees who have read them. I speak for no one individual but am confident that these opinions are accurate. I won’t reproduce the whole letter but will show you the lines that cause the most damage.
Overall, I like the direction in which we're heading and appreciate the hard work and ingenuity of our teams globally.
I believe you are sincere. However, every employee reading this is already thinking “uh oh, this means something bad is coming”. Your task should have been to explain what and provide complete transparency about why. Spoiler: you didn’t.
But, the biggest reason I'm still here is our culture.
The biggest reason is the culture, huh. Willing to give back some of the millions you made while laying people off since culture was the big selling point? I kid (maybe?). The more you pander, the more employees know something is up and will believe you less.
But, keeping your culture strong is not a birthright. You have to work at it all the time.
We agree here. The issue with the line is you (eventually) tell use the changes needed to maintain the culture, but not how it impacts the culture. You may think this is obvious, but your audience sees you not as a partner, nor as an enemy, but as someone who is NOT on their side.
(you need to be joined at the hip with your teammates when inventing and solving hard problems)
Your employees want to be joined at the hip with their spouses, family, and friends – not their company. The message – even if unintentional – is that you want them to put the company on an equal level. The lesson, particularly in tech, that the younger generation has learned? The company has no loyalty to them. When profits are only a couple billion dollars instead of many billions of dollars, they will get rid of them.
Andy, ever seen the movie North Dallas Forty? There is a great scene where a player yells at the manager “when I call it a game, you call it a business. When I call it a business, you call it a game.” It is ok that you are a business to make money. Employees know it. Stop trying to make it a larger calling or anything more. Everyone recognizes that for what it is – BS.
And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership.
If I had high ownership, I would be able to work where I want and when I want with the idea of getting tasks done well. You brag about high ownership mentality and then turn around and give zero ownership privileges in terms of autonomy. You see that, right?
As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially as we have the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers. In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It's created artifacts that we'd like to change
I’m pivoting here to my role as a coach of managers. You are 100% correct in the assessment and 100% wrong in the solution. The things you point out isn’t a facet of managers, it a facet of bad managers. Everyone wants to work for a great manager and great managers don’t do the things you describe. The solution isn’t to get rid of managers, but to create an accountability structure to make managers better.
Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today.
Maybe? But then you would be the exception, not the rule. All the data shows that manager levels of burnout and stress are higher than ever. Fewer young people want to be managers because they see how poorly the org treats them. Managers feel caught between the competition between employees and managers. If you think having fewer of them will help any of this, you are not nearly as smart as you think.
The biggest misconception is that without those additional layers, senior leadership can communicate more effectively with employees. You can’t. The benefit of great managers is that they are the glue and translator between you and employees. The fewer of them you have and the more you put on their plate, the less effective they are at this critical role.
.. we've decided that we're going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.
I’m sorry to be blunt – but this is clear garbage. There is no data that shows at an organizational level either remote, hybrid, or fully in office works best. In fact, the data says it is incredibly dependent on the people, role, and work. To set a company mandate is essentially saying “this is what we want, regardless of the data”. That is what every employee reads in this.
Plus, you’ve had trouble getting everyone to come in the 3 days a week, right? Everyone has. Obviously, being more draconian in your pronouncements is the answer for a “high ownership” workforce with people that you already said are succeeding.
Here is what COVID taught employees – the organization can still make billions in profits if they don’t sit at their desk every day. You’ve done it. You saying anything else is (sorry for the language) 100% horseshit.
Before the pandemic, not everybody was in the office five days a week, every week.
You get caught up in your own words here. You’ve said that it worked in the past without a draconian policy, even before COVID. Why do you need to be so insistent now? Truth is, every employee knows why. Because you want to get your way. You wanted people in the office, they didn’t listen, and now you will make them. They see it as petulant. Make all the rationalizations you want.
Having the right culture at Amazon is something I don't take for granted. I continue to believe that we are all here because we want to make a difference in customers' lives, invent on their behalf, and move quickly to solve their problems.
Maybe? If so, good for those people having such a positive attitude. Most are there for the paycheck. If given a choice between figuring out a way to sell a book for a Kindle or spending the day at the beach with my family, few would pick the book selling. They do it because they have to. Refer to the North Dallas Forty reference if you are wondering why I say that.
One last question for you (and I mean this sincerely even though I can’t figure a way to write it without snark): I know you and your board think your executive compensation is in line with what executives get paid in your position. If the board said “we want to be forward thinking and cut your compensation in half”, would culture keep you there or would you be insulted and feel less appreciated? If you can’t say “yes” with 100% certainty – then stop extolling culture. Every employee knows and believes this: Culture matters until it gets in the way of more profits.
Thanks for reading Andy.