AWS CEO says most staff he's spoken with are 'excited' about RTO, leaked transcript shows

• AWS CEO Matt Garman addressed the new return-to-office policy Thursday in an all-hands meeting.
• He said remote work made it hard to innovate, according to a transcript of the meeting BI obtained.
• Garman said those who didn't want to work in the office were welcome to leave.

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has said that most of the staff he's spoken with favor the company's new five-day return-to-office policy.

The AWS chief told employees Thursday that remote work made it hard to innovate and collaborate and that those who disagreed with the new policy were welcome to leave the company, according to a transcript of an all-hands meeting obtained by Business Insider.

Garman addressed the RTO policy introduced by Amazon last month, which has led to strong pushback from some employees.

Most of Amazon's corporate employees will be required to come into the office five days a week starting in January.

Garman said nine out of 10 Amazon employees he'd spoken with were "actually quite excited by this change." He added there were days when his team "didn't really accomplish anything, like we didn't get to work together and learn from each other," because people may be in offices on different days.

"When we want to innovate. When we want to really, really innovate on interesting products, I have not seen an ability for us to do that when we're not in person," Garman said. "And so if there are people who just don't work well in that environment and don't want to, that's OK. There are other companies around."

He added: "I don't mean that in a bad way. There are other places, but at Amazon, we want to be in an environment where we are working together."

It is Garman's first official response to Amazon's new RTO policy and comes after the company received backlash from some employees. One Amazon employee told BI that he felt the decision was a "betrayal" and that he planned on "coffee badging" instead of working from the office five days a week.

However, one former Amazon executive told BI that the company was right to ask staff to return to the office five days a week because it would help "jump-start growth again."

An Amazon spokesperson declined to comment on the leaked transcript. Instead, the spokesperson pointed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy's previous RTO announcement from September, in which he said the "advantages of being together in the office are significant." The spokesperson added that the RTO plan was an "effort to strengthen our culture" and that suggesting otherwise is "inaccurate."

During the all-hands meeting, which was first reported by Reuters, Garman said employees would not always need to be in the office. For example, he said employees were free to attend customer meetings or an external event.

There will still be flexibility to work from home, he added, such as if an employee needs to be in for an appliance to be repaired. He added that the goal was to rebuild the pre-pandemic office culture that had healthy in-person debates and brainstorming sessions.

Garman also said that Amazon's leadership principles and culture had helped drive growth and make the company "special" and that those principles could be experienced only in person.

"There's just a bunch of things that happen in a collaborative environment where we really get creative and can work together," Garman said.

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