Amazon (AMZN) CEO Andy Jassy has recently been increasing pressure on employees as the company reimagines its work culture.
During an internal company meeting last month, Jassy emphasized his goal of eliminating bureaucracy from Amazon’s work culture.
He said the best leaders “get the most done with the least resources required to do the job.” He also stated that “every new project shouldn’t take 50 or more people to do it.”
“The way to get ahead at Amazon is not to go accumulate a giant team and fiefdom,” said Jassy. “There’s no award for having a big team. We want to be scrappy about us to do a lot more things.”
Jassy also urged employees to “move fast and act like owners,” as some of the company’s competition is “working seven days a week, 15 hours a day.”
Amazon CEO pressures employees to up their game
In his annual letter to shareholders, Jassy doubled down on these ideas. The millionaire CEO said his goal is for Amazon to “operate like the world’s largest startup.”
“We have a disproportionate need for builders,” said Jassy in the letter. “These are inventors. They’re people constantly dissecting customer experiences, even ones that seem pretty good today, and asking why they can’t be better. They’re divinely discontent (maybe annoyingly so for team members proud of what they’ve previously built), and never feel like the job is done.”
He also said that because Amazon operates in “fiercely competitive market segments,” it has to focus more on moving faster.
“It’s a false binary to argue that you can move fast or deliver high standards,” said Jassy. “If you want to be fast, you can be fast, and still be high quality. We’ve done it for many years (though we can still be faster). Speed is a leadership decision. The leadership team has to believe it’s a priority, reinforce it constantly, organize and remove structural barriers, and build in modular ways that enable pace. But, speed does not happen unless the entire company and culture embrace it.”
Jassy also emphasized the importance of Amazon keeping up with the pace of artificial intelligence to be “competitive,” and part of that requires scaling back remote work and collaborating more in person.
“Of course, you can invent with everybody remote (and some cultures seem to prefer that),” said Jassy. “However, in my experience, it doesn’t compare to being in the same room. The energy, the pace, the spontaneous brainstorming, the willingness for people to jump in, the way ideas evolve in real-time, and the post-meeting iteration is much better when in the same room—and yields better outcomes for our customers and teams.”
Jassy’s comments come after the company began requiring corporate employees to work in the office five days a week after allowing them to do so only three days a week under the previous in-office mandate.
Amazon hops on a growing trend that is making workers nervous
Amazon’s push to rapidly develop AI comes as it plans to spend $100 billion on capital expenditures this year, with most of it spent on AI development.
Other large companies, such as Microsoft and Google, have also recently increased their investments in AI. As the tech industry bets big on technology, many employees nationwide are becoming anxious about the impact the technology could have on the future of their jobs.
According to a recent survey from YouGov, more than one-third of U.S. workers are concerned that AI will result in job loss or decreased work hours. Also, 56% of workers in the survey believe that AI will shrink the number of job opportunities, and 55% think that their work hours will be reduced due to the technology.
Source – https://www.thestreet.com/employment/amazon-ceo-gives-hard-nosed-message-to-employees