Original link: Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Strengthening our culture and teams / Amazon.
Quotes:
... We want to operate like the world’s largest startup. ... 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 (e.g., pre-meetings for the pre-meetings for the decision meetings, a longer line of managers feeling like they need to review a topic before it moves forward, owners of initiatives feeling less like they should make recommendations because the decision will be made elsewhere, etc.). ... So, we’re asking each s-team organization to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025. Having fewer managers will remove layers and flatten organizations more than they are today. ... By the way, I’ve created a “Bureaucracy Mailbox” for any examples any of you see where we might have bureaucracy or unnecessary process that’s crept in and we can root out… ... To address the second issue of being better set up to invent, collaborate, and be connected enough to each other and our culture to deliver the absolute best for customers and the business, we’ve decided that we’re going to return to being in the office the way we were before the onset of COVID. ...
Employees may not like RTO, but his anti-bureaucrazy line makes perfect sense to me. And regarding RTO then I also see a point - experienced staff may not need to be in the office to learn, but new staff need to be in the office to learn and the experienced staff need to be in the office for them to learn from.