‘The creative energy’: Amazon Web Services CEO on why return-to-office is better

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company’s return-to-office mandate for five days a week starting in January is the right decision because “innovation” and “speed of execution” becomes better when teams work in person, according to a Business Insider report.
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“Just the creative energy and how fast you’re able to iterate when you’re sitting there writing on a whiteboard or you’re talking to people in the cubicle next to you or you’re running into people that are in a different department, but you see them at the coffee line or whatever it is,” the report quoted Garman as saying at The Wall Street Journal’s Tech Live event on Monday evening.
Garmann said these exchanges cannot happen when employees work remotely.
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He also attributed the return-to-office mandate’s introduction to Amazon initially asking employees to come in three times a week, which resulted in everyone picking a different set of three days to come in.
“If it’s not for you, then that’s okay — you can go and find another company if you want to,” the report quoted him as saying to his employees.
He added that most of the employees were excited about everyone working in person too.
However, the report cited internal messages after the policy was announced, which showed that some Amazon employees were unhappy with the change, with one employee writing, “what ever happened to ‘Striving to be Earth’s Best Employer’?”
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