Amazon CEO Andy Jassy caused a stir last week when he announced in a public memo that all employees would be expected back in the office five days per week starting January 2025.
However, those who keep eyes on employment trends are also questioning the logic of another part of that memo which pointed directly at an excess of managers as a cause of excess bureaucracy.
“As we have grown our teams as quickly and substantially… the last many years, we have understandably added a lot of managers. In that process, we have also added more layers than we had before. It’s created artifacts that we’d like to change,” Jassy stated, going on to explain how, in his view, this has resulted in bottlenecks in productivity.