Amazon’s Andy Jassy denies its 5-day-a-week RTO plan is a secret way to reduce headcount

Jassy announced the company’s strict return-to-office mandate in a September memo, sparking immediate outrage from employees, some of which had been working at least two days remotely per week since May 2023. 

Some experts have theorized that Jassy’s RTO plan could be a sneaky way of reducing the company’s headcount, rather than go through the formal process of conducting layoffs. Yet, in an all-hands meeting Tuesday, Jassy denied claims that the RTO plan was a “backdoor layoff” or that the company had reached some agreement with city leaders. 

“I can tell you both of those are not true. You know, this was not a cost play for us. This is very much about our culture and strengthening our culture,” he said, according to a transcript reported by Reuters.

Following the September RTO announcement, 73% of employees surveyed by anonymous job review site Blind said they had considered quitting in light of the new policy. Other employees quickly took to LinkedIn to change their status to #opentowork in hopes of finding a more flexible position. But in the company’s Amazon Web Services unit, CEO Matt Garman was clear that the naysayers could go elsewhere.

“If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around,” Garman said on an internal call last month, referencing the company’s RTO policy, Reuters reported. 

To make clear their frustration with the RTO policy, hundreds of AWS employees signed a letter last month protesting the change, calling it an “outright abdication” of AWS’s role as an innovator and industry leader.

To be sure, Amazon has offered employees commuter benefits and subsidized parking, among other perks to help ease the transition.

In the memo from September, Jassy said it’s easier for employees to learn and collaborate while in person. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for Amazon told Fortune the RTO plan is meant to strengthen the company’s culture and ensure teams are connected.

The RTO memo asked workers to go back to “the way we were before the onset of COVID,” and banned working from home except for extraordinary circumstances. Jassy pointed out in the memo that intense coding work or having a sick child were appropriate times to work from home with manager consent. 

While managers earlier this year received approval to fire employees who didn’t comply with the previous three-day in-office mandate, many still made changes to their lives based on Amazon’s flexibility. 

In the Tuesday all-hands meeting, Jasssy acknowledged the five-day RTO policy, which takes effect in January, would take some getting used to. 

“It is an adjustment. I understand that for a lot of people, and we’re going to be working through that adjustment together,” Jassy said.

A newsletter for the boldest, brightest leaders:

CEO Daily is your weekday morning dossier on the news, trends, and chatter business leaders need to know.

Sign up here.