Read the letter sent to AWS CEO Matt Garman, signed by 500 employees, protesting his RTO comments

• AWS CEO Matt Garman has been sent a letter from employees protesting his pro-RTO comments.
• Garman had said most employees he’d spoken with were excited about a five-day office return.
• Over 500 employees have signed a letter, sent Wednesday, urging Garman to reconsider the plans.

Amazon Web Services’ CEO, Matt Garman, is facing backlash from some employees over his comments about its return-to-office policy, according to an open letter obtained by Business Insider.

Over 500 employees signed a letter sent to the AWS chief on Wednesday criticizing his recent remarks about Amazon’s mandate to return to the office five days a week, which is up from its previous policy of three days a week.

The letter urges Garman to reconsider his position on the RTO mandate. It comes after Garman told staffers during an all-hands meeting earlier this month that nine out of 10 employees he’d spoken with were excited to return to the office full time.

Garman addressed the policy, announced in September, for the first time in the meeting, saying “there are other companies around” for any employee who doesn’t wish to abide by the new policy, according to a transcript of the meeting reviewed by BI. He added that he didn’t mean it in a “bad way.”

Some employees aren’t buying Garman’s comments that most people he had spoken with were “actually quite excited by this change,” a copy of the letter and internal Slack messages viewed by BI showed.

The letter said: “By rigidly mandating a 5-day in-office culture and telling employees who cannot or will not contribute to the company’s mission in this specific way that ‘there are other companies around,’ you are silencing critical perspectives and damaging our culture and our future in doing so.”

Garman also said in the all-hands meeting that he hadn’t seen people’s ability to “really innovate” when they’re not working together in person. The letter said his comments did “not align with the experiences of many employees.”

In messages viewed by BI, one staffer wrote on an Amazon Slack channel: “This statement from Matt doesn’t ring true with me or our teams.”

Another staffer said Garman “ambushed- er spontaneously approached random AWS engineers” at the company’s headquarters to gather the consensus that most employees he’d talked to were excited by the RTO mandate.

Garman’s remarks came after Amazon said in September it would require employees to work from the office every day beginning next year. The policy is stricter than at Amazon’s peer companies and, by some accounts, stricter than Amazon’s office-work policy before the pandemic. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, in a memo announcing the mandate, said that the company had made the decision to “further strengthen” its culture and teams.

Amazon had 1.5 million employees in 2023, most of whom worked in warehouses. There are more than 30,000 employees on the internal Slack channel where the letter originated. The letter has been signed by 523 staff from Amazon and AWS, with 172 of those including their names.

In response to a request for comment about the letter, an Amazon spokesperson, Margaret Callahan, told BI the company was offering resources to employees depending on their location, including elder care, pet sitters, caregiver referral services, and commuter benefits.

Read a full copy of the open letter below:

Mr. Garman,

As employees of AWS and Amazon who work tirelessly every day to obsess over and innovate on behalf of our customers, we were appalled to hear the non-data-driven explanation you gave for Amazon imposing a 5-day in-office mandate at the AWS Global Meeting on October 17th.

Your comments, in part, stated:

I think nine out of ten people are actually quite excited by this change. There’s a number of reasons for it … what makes Amazon special is our ability to debate and our ability to innovate. And 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. There is just no substitute for getting up on a whiteboard and walking through what’s going on, having a brainstorm and stopping in the cubicle next to you and asking the person where it is, and grabbing coffee or lunch together and chatting about it, learning what other people are working on and it sparking something in what you’re working on — that just doesn’t work when you’re working remote, it just doesn’t happen … And so we feel, and I feel very strongly that that is just such an important part of the company that getting us back in the office and in an office setting is super important.

Not only are these comments inconsistent with the experiences of many employees, they indicate an outright abdication of AWS’ role as one of the world’s most innovative companies and a leader in our industry. By making these statements, you are continuing and compounding a trend by Amazon’s S-team of misrepresenting the realities of working at Amazon and the impact this mandate will have on the company and, by extension, its customers.

Amazon claims to be a data-driven company, and statements which rely on “we believe” and “I feel,” or exclaim how many people are excited about something to justify themselves fail to achieve our standard of decision making for critical issues that impact hundreds of thousands of the company’s employees and its customers. Your statements indicate that either you have not collected enough data to support your position but are moving ahead anyways, or you have seen the data which indicates otherwise and are choosing to ignore it, or you have motivations to support this policy which you are not being forthcoming about with those it impacts. All of these possibilities break the trust of your employees who have not only personal experience that shows the benefits of remote work, but have seen the extensive data which supports that experience.

Data from independent research has shown time and time again that companies which embrace flexible in-office policies allow a more diverse set of workers to sustainably and effectively contribute to the shared goals of businesses like ours. If being inclusive and understanding of employees’ personal working styles and circumstances isn’t enough to justify why this is the right approach for us to take, research is clear that diverse perspectives lead to more innovation, productivity, and resilience. This diversity in backgrounds, locations, and working styles is essential to AWS’ ability to hire and retain exceptional talent and remain a market leader and innovator in the future.

By rigidly mandating a 5-day in-office culture and telling employees who cannot or will not contribute to the company’s mission in this specific way that “there are other companies around,” you are silencing critical perspectives and damaging our culture and our future in doing so. Moreover, this does not uphold Amazon’s espoused “Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer” leadership principle, especially for select and protected groups who have sought a safer, more inclusive, and healthier work environment and are disproportionately impacted by these policies. These groups include but are not limited to working parents (especially those with young children), employees who are neurodiverse or have disabilities or disorders, workers with caretaking responsibilities, and workers on a visa who have no choice but to comply or risk having to leave their home by quitting.

While your remarks focus on some of the benefits you perceive in in-person collaboration, they fail to even acknowledge the significant challenges it presents to these valued workers who have often overcome adversity at every level in order to contribute to Amazon’s mission. In order to highlight these challenges, we have included a selection of anonymous stories from Amazon employees about the impact Amazon’s 3-day in-office policy has already had on their life and work with this letter. In addition, studies show that Return To Office mandates tend to push out more senior and tenured employees across the board, who may be best poised to participate in and give insight into these white-boarding and brainstorming sessions you refer to, while hurting the morale of those who stay.

You have not addressed these issues nor presented any solution to them while touting the new and even more impactful 5-day policy. We do not accept this from our leaders. We see and value contributions from workers of these groups every day, and will not stand silently by while you dismiss their humanity and trivialize their impact.

Our time working remotely during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic proved that we are effective, creative, and successful without being primarily in-person, and to take no lessons from that experience would be extremely disappointing, because Amazon is and always will be a global company. We will always collaborate with teams and stakeholders in different physical locations, countries, and timezones where the primary, and potentially only, interaction is virtual. We have tools and approaches to do this effectively which are not novel or difficult to use. On the contrary, pushing for more time in-office will harm these countless cross-regional interactions as there will be significantly fewer overlapping working hours between collaborators. This can lead to meetings that might have been done by videoconferencing now taking place via asynchronous mechanisms like email, which slows the velocity of decision-making from minutes to hours or days.

Finally, by taking this action, AWS is not living up to its full potential and is creating a bleak outlook for its future. While it is absolutely true that there are challenges with flexible and remote work, we have always been a company that solves problems in new, exciting, and innovative ways, rather than relying on antiquated approaches that happened to work well some time in the past. The cloud computing industry that we now base our work and livelihoods on might not exist today if we had adhered to that restrictive thinking in our early days.

Given the scale of the problems we tackle across a workforce which is distributed all over the world, we are not content with relying on spontaneous in-office conversations to make progress and drive new ideas. We are instructed to collect, interpret, and act on data and invent new mechanisms to affect the outcomes we want to see, not to sit back and hope good things happen. We worry that when customers see us encounter a true challenge and refuse to solve problems that stand in the way of embracing it, they will rightly lose trust in AWS’ ability to innovate.

For these reasons we urge you to reconsider your comments and your position on the proposed 5-day in-office mandate. Remote and flexible work is an opportunity for Amazon to take the lead, not a threat. We want to work for a company and for leaders that
recognize and seize this moment to challenge us to reinvent how we work.

Respectfully signed by 523 Amazonians, 172 of whom have elected to include their name below.

Editor’s note: BI has removed the names of the employees who signed the letter to protect their privacy.

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