Amazon went on a hiring spree during the Covid-19 pandemic, adding staffers to its corporate workforce and in its hundreds of warehouses across the U.S. Its global workforce swelled to more than 1.6 million by the end of 2021, up from 798,000 in the fourth quarter of 2019. The company had more than 1.5 million employees as of the end of the third quarter.
Amazon is also making some changes to its "hub strategy," which dictates the offices teams primarily use, as part of the reorganization, Herdener said. The goal is to have "more team members working in the same physical location as the majority of their teammates and/or manager," he wrote. Herdener said he is leaving it up to his direct reports to decide which locations make sense for their teams.