A senior Amazon executive has a simple message for employees who don’t like the tech giant’s return-to-office mandate: work somewhere else.

Amazon last month confirmed that it would be requiring all of its near-300,000 corporate employees to work from the office full-time from the start of next year, rolling back the commonplace practice of working from home that emerged from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Many Amazon workers have reacted with anger and disappointment at the mandate, with concerns surrounding commuting time and costs, and a lack of data to justify the move.

But Amazon AWS CEO Matt Garman told employees last week that the return-to-office mandate had his backing, and that workers who don’t like it should leave the company.

“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 told AWS staff, as reported by Reuters.

“By the way, I don’t mean that in a bad way.

“We want to be in an environment where we’re working together.

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.”

Mixed excitement

Garman said that nine out of 10 employees he had spoken to were supportive of the new policy.

“I’m actually quite excited about this change – I know not everyone is,” he said.

Amazon workers are currently required to work at least three days per week from a physical office, but this has not been effective, he said.

“We didn’t really accomplish anything, like we didn’t get to work together and learn from each other,” Garman said.

There will likely be many of Amazon’s tech rivals lining up to poach its employees who want to continue working from home, with many large companies declining to implement similar mandates.

The likes of Google, Meta and Microsoft, among other large tech firms, only require employees to attend an office two or three days each week.

In announcing the mandate, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that the “advantages of being together in the office are significant”.

“Before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward – our expectation is that people will be in the office, outside of extenuating circumstances,” he said.

Employees want flexibility

Amazon is now risking a staff exodus due to the return-to-office mandate, with previous research finding that employees of all levels will consider leaving their company if they are forced to return to the office.

A report from earlier this year found that senior executives are pushing to maintain working from home along with more junior workers, and that large US tech firms that did require a return to the office saw many key staff members leave and join their rivals.

Another recent study found that just under 40 per cent of respondents would quit their current role if remote working was axed.

A number of studies have found a range of benefits associated with working from home, including to the physical and mental health of employees, and a company’s overall productivity and efficiency.

Research has found that those who work from home devote about one-third of the time they save from commuting on extra unpaid work, while one in five said that working from home makes them a “lot more productive”.