Amazon To Cut Management Layers, End Work From Home

Amazon.com, Inc. AMZN CEO Andy Jassy is slashing management layers and making employees to return to the office five days a week beginning in January at the world's largest online retailer and cloud-computing company founded by billionaire Jeff Bezos.

The changes, sent in a memo to employees on Monday, would address what company veterans see as unnecessary meetings and layers of approvals just to get things done, Bloomberg reported.

Each major entity within Amazon must increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15% by the end of March 2025, Jassy said. Changes also include a bureaucracy tipline for employees to raise concerns about unnecessary processes.

Since the pandemic ended, Amazon had required workers to badge in at least three days a week, depending on their team needs. Amazon's new return to office policy will make exceptions for extenuating circumstances or previously approved remote jobs, Jassy said.

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Most of Amazon's roughly 1.5 million employees worldwide are hourly employees who retrieve items and ship packages, people for whom remote work was never an option, but the company employs hundreds of thousands of office workers.

The changes may boost downtown foot traffic in cities where Amazon operates, such as Seattle; Bellevue, Washington; Arlington, Virginia; San Francisco; Austin, Texas; Boston; and Nashville, Tennessee.

The company has already tried to get workers back in the office, an effort that workers resisted by arguing the company was inflexible and failed to show data that working in person created better outcomes.

Exchange-traded funds that hold the stock also went down.

• ProShares Online Retail ETF ONLN declined 0.24%.
• Fidelity MSCI Consumer Discretionary Index ETF FDIS fell 1.33%.
• Vanguard Consumer Discretionary Index Fund ETF Shares VCR slipped 0.16%.

Price Action: Amazon slipped 0.86% to close at $184.89 on Monday.

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