Leaked: Whole Foods CEO tells staff he wants to turn Amazon’s RTO mandate into more ‘carrot’ than ‘stick’
Amazon’s five-day return-to-office order sent shock waves throughout the company and the broader business world last month. On Tuesday, Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel stepped up to the mic to assuage employee concerns at the Amazon-owned grocery chain.
Saying he wanted Whole Foods employees to feel incentivized rather than bludgeoned into coming to the office every day, Buechel touted initiatives such as an “office experience task force” during a special meeting to address the RTO policy.
“I want us to figure out, how do we find the win-win overall in supporting Whole Foods Market, our team members, our customers, and beyond,” Buechel said in the all-hands meeting on Tuesday, a recording of which was reviewed by Fortune.
“Our goal here is not to make this seem like this is a stick,” he added. “We want to help create and work with our team members [in] having the carrot and getting the excitement about bringing back the culture and ultimately the interactions that we once had in our offices across the company.”
Buechel said that his leadership team fielded 1,200 questions in advance of the meeting, which lasted a little less than an hour. Three employees attending the meeting in person were also given the mic to ask questions.
The town hall comes two weeks after Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that his company, which bought Whole Foods in 2017, would return to a full five days in office on Jan. 2, 2025, after nearly five years of remote and hybrid work at Amazon and its subsidiaries. Whole Foods spokesperson Rachel Malish only confirmed that Whole Foods staff will abide by the new Amazon mandate but did not respond to Fortune’s questions about the staff meeting.
Jassy’s announcement came across as a tacit acknowledgement of a fraying corporate culture inside Amazon in recent years, as Fortune recently chronicled. Jassy also noted that Amazon would look to thin out middle management and the bureaucracy that the CEO believes comes from too much of it, by reducing the ratio of middle managers to individual employees by 15%. One Whole Foods employee on Tuesday questioned leadership about how such a cut would be carried out at the organic grocery store chain. But Whole Foods HR exec Brian O’Connell told employees that that number is just a “target” and that the grocer has already “done a lot of good work” in reducing this ratio over the past year.
“I don’t imagine we’re going to make a 15% reduction,” he said.
Among the other queries employees had for management were questions about why Whole Foods workers should have to follow Amazon’s mandate when their compensation doesn’t always match that of their parent company counterparts, to whether the move was intended to force staff out, to how leadership plans to deal with a potential brain drain.
Leadership offered vague answers to many questions—“freedom within a framework of a norm of an office-based culture” was one phrase from a Whole Foods marketing exec that especially rankled employees—and failed to explain how five days in office would fix problems that three days in person couldn’t. But Buechel was adamant that the mandate was not meant as an alternative to layoffs and that there would be flexibility to work from home when requiring quiet time to hit a deadline or if an unexpected personal need requires it.
Buechel and other company executives pointed to efforts such as the creation of a new “office experience task force” made up of employees across company divisions who would be charged with brainstorming ideas to help staff transition from their current three-day hybrid structure to a new “office-based culture.”
“What are things that we can do to make it exciting to come here and experience and work with our team members day in, day out?” the CEO asked rhetorically.
The responsibility of figuring out how this balancing act will work will fall to individual managers, Buechel said. As for the company tracking how often employees badge into the office, which Jassy said would continue during the transition to full in-office work, the Whole Foods CEO said it would continue for now, but “my goal is to get rid of this” if employees “work responsibly.”
“I don’t want us to be in this space,” he said. “I don’t want this to seem like we are punching a clock from 8 to 5. And I don’t want to be in a spot where we are tracking this.”
Are you a current or former Whole Foods employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.com, or through secure messaging app Signal at 917-655-4267. You can also message him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X.
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