![]() In the more productive brainstorm sessions I’ve been a part of over the years, people get excited and blurt out new ideas or improvements to prior proposals, quickly advancing the seed of an idea, and leading to the broader group getting energized and feeling that it’s onto something. The energy and riffing on one another’s ideas happen more freely. Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re in person. Strengthening it further is a top priority for the s-team and me. Our culture has been one of the most critical parts of our success the first 27 years, and I expect it will be in our next 27+ years as well. Of course, there will be plenty of meetings that will have significant virtual participation, but having more in-person interactions helps people absorb the culture better. It’s also easier for leaders to teach when they have more people in a room at one time, can better assess whether the team is digesting the information as intended and if not, how they need to adjust their communication. For those unsure about why something happened or somebody reacted a certain way, it’s easier to ask ad-hoc questions on the way to lunch, in the elevator, or the hallway whereas when you’re at home, you’re less likely to do so. When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated. It’s especially true for new people (and we’ve hired a lot of people in the pandemic) but it’s also true for people of all tenures at Amazon. It’s easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we’re in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues. Our respective views of what we thought was optimal evolved as the pandemic wore on and then eased. ![]() The guiding principle in these conversations was to prioritize what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, and relentlessly invent to do so. S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach. We subsequently updated guidance a few times, with the last guidance (in the second half of 2021) being that Director-level leaders would decide for their teams where they’d work, and we’d experiment for the next chunk of time.īecause the pandemic lasted as long as it did, we were able to observe various models-some teams working exclusively from home, some in the office full-time together, and many flavors of hybrid-over a meaningful period of time. ![]() It’s hard to believe, but it’s been nearly three years since the pandemic began, and we recommended that all our employees who were able to work from home do so. ![]()
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