Amazon’s 5-day return-to-office order sent shockwaves throughout the company and business community last month. On Tuesday, Whole Foods CEO Jason Buechel took to the microphone to address the concerns of employees at the Amazon-owned grocery chain.
Buechel said he wanted Whole Foods employees to be incentivized, rather than pressured, to come to the office every day, and during a special meeting announced initiatives such as an “office experience task force” to engage with the RTO directive.
“I want us to figure out how to find an overall win-win situation in supporting Whole Foods Market, our team members, our customers and beyond,” Buechel said at Tuesday’s all-hands meeting, the recording of which was checked by Assets.
“Our goal here is not to give the impression that it’s a stick,” he added. “We want to help our team members create and collaborate [in] We have the carrot and enthusiasm to bring back the culture and ultimately the interactions we once had in our offices across the company.”
Buechel said his leadership team answered 1,200 questions in advance of the meeting, which lasted a little less than an hour. Three employees who attended the meeting in person were also given the microphone to ask questions.
The town hall comes two weeks later Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that his company, which bought Whole Foods in 2017, would be back on the job for a full five days on January 2, 2025, after nearly five years of remote and hybrid work at Amazon and its subsidiaries. Whole Foods spokeswoman Rachel Malish only confirmed that Whole Foods employees will comply with the new Amazon mandate, but did not respond Assets‘s questions about the staff meeting.
Jassy’s announcement seemed like one tacit admission of a frayed corporate culture within Amazon in recent years, as Assets recently recorded. Jassy’s announcement also said that Amazon would seek to thin out middle management and reduce the bureaucracy that the CEO believes was due to this by reducing the ratio of middle management to individual employees by 15 percent . A Whole Foods employee questioned leadership Tuesday about how such a cut would be implemented at the organic grocery chain. But Brian O’Connell, human resources manager at Whole Foods, told employees that that number was just a “target” and that the grocer had already “done a lot of good work” over the past year to lower that rate.
“I can’t imagine we’re going to do a 15% reduction,” he said.
Other questions employees had for management included questions about why Whole Foods employees should follow Amazon’s mandate when their compensation doesn’t always match those of their colleagues at the parent company, whether the move was intended to keep employees at bay repress, and how leadership plans to deal with a potential brain drain.
Leadership gave vague answers to many questions—“freedom within the confines of an office culture norm” was a line from a Whole Foods marketing executive that particularly angered employees—and failed to explain how five days in office would resolve three days Personally, that didn’t work for days. However, Buechel insisted that the mandate was not intended as an alternative to layoffs and that there would be flexibility to work from home if rest breaks were needed to meet a deadline or if an unexpected personal need required it.
Buechel and other companies pointed to efforts such as the creation of a new “Office Experience Task Force,” made up of employees from all areas of the company, tasked with brainstorming ideas to help employees transition from their current three-day hybrid structure to a new “Office Experience Task Force”. Office culture.”
“What can we do to make it exciting to come here and experience and work with our team members day in and day out?” the CEO asked rhetorically.
The responsibility for figuring out how this balancing act will work falls to individual managers, Buechel said. As for the company tracking how often employees log into the office, which Jassy said will continue during the transition to full in-office work, the Whole Foods CEO said it will continue for now, but “my goal is to to get rid of this.” Employees “work responsibly”.
“I don’t want us to stay in this room,” he said. “I don’t want it to seem like we’re changing the time from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. And I don’t want to be at a point where we’re pursuing that.”
Are you a current or former Whole Foods employee with thoughts on this topic or would you like to share a tip? Contact Jason Del Rey at jason.delrey@fortune.com, jasondelrey@protonmail.comor via the secure messaging app Signal at 917-655-4267. You can also send him a message on LinkedIn or at @delrey To X.
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