In shareholder letter, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy asks employees to return to office from May

In his letter, Jassy also asked employees to work from the office at least three days a week from May.

He said that invention happens when employees work in person and that working from home is not “the best long-term approach.”

“We also looked hard at how we were working together as a team and asked our corporate employees to come back to the office at least three days a week, beginning in May,” he said in his letter.

Jassy said the company’s employees rallied to get work done from home and did everything possible to keep up with the unexpected circumstances, “but we don’t think it’s the best long-term approach.”

“We’ve become convinced that collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re working together and learning from one another in person,” he said.

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“Invention is often messy. It wanders and meanders and marinates. Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in-person than virtually. It’s also significantly easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues, he added.Innovation and our unique culture have been incredibly important in our first 29 years as a company, and I expect it will be comparably so in the next 29, the CEO added.

Meanwhile, Jassy said despite 2022 being one of the harder macroeconomic years, the company still found a way to grow demand.

“While there were an unusual number of simultaneous challenges this past year, the reality is that if you operate in large, dynamic, global market segments with many capable and well-funded competitors, conditions rarely stay stagnant for long,” he added.

Adding that companies should embrace change, he said the companies that do this well over a long period of time usually succeed.

“Change is always around the corner. Sometimes, you proactively invite it in, and sometimes it just comes a-knocking. But, when you see it’s coming, you have to embrace it,” he said.

Talking about the shutdown of some verticals and job cuts, he said the company took a deep look at each initiative’s long-term potential and “in some cases, it led to us shuttering certain businesses.”

“We also reprioritized where to spend our resources, which ultimately led to the hard decision to eliminate 27,000 corporate roles,” he said.

“There are a number of other changes that we’ve made over the last several months to streamline our overall costs, and like most leadership teams, we’ll continue to evaluate what we’re seeing in our business and proceed adaptively,” he added.