Amazon's Take on Return-to-Office

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**Andy Jassy** (0:56)
Like most companies, people were largely working remote. And when we brought people back to the office three days a week in May of 23, we noticed that a lot of things about how we were inventing and how we were collaborating got better.
And if you do a lot of inventing like we do, and our style of invention is often very collaborative.
We're in meetings together, we're iterating with one another. When you're together, that invention is stronger. What you find is people riff on top of each other's ideas better if they're together. Turns out sometimes it's actually useful to interrupt each other, because you get to a faster spot more quickly, you feel that energy. A lot of our best inventions have been after really messy wandering meetings when we've been trying to invent something, but we haven't quite gotten there and we've resolved ourselves to go have another meeting in a few days to figure it out. And then three people stay behind on a whiteboard and actually map out what it was they couldn't figure out, or on the way back to their office, they figure it out, or later in the day, they walk by each other's offices. When you're remote, the meeting ends, and you're on to the next jingle on the next meeting, and you just don't find that type of invention together. I also think if you want to teach the culture, it's much harder to see it when you're remote. You have a lot of people who are lurking off camera, or if they're on camera, they look like they're looking at the camera, but they're also working on a spreadsheet. And when you're in a meeting together, and you're watching the body language, and you're watching people's expressions, you internalize the culture much better.