The uproar online regarding this piece is extraordinary. Just about every tech and business site on Earth is running something on these revelations. The New York Times article is almost an expose. Its tales from the Amazon workplace reveal an uncompromisingly relentless culture of 80 hour weeks, high expectations, and zero tolerance for “life as we know it.”
Readers please note — You do need to read the NYT article to get the full picture. It’s too big to cite instances.
This is a very tough employment culture. Employees are expected to comment on the performance of their colleagues. Serious medical conditions like breast cancer can be classed as “performance issues”, regardless of the nature of the problem.
The unrelenting pace of Amazon white collar jobs is also responsible for what’s called “churnover,” a massive turnover in staff. The median term of employment at Amazon is one year. That’s roughly rock bottom.
In career terms, that period of employment also has a very strong negative aspect — a resume showing one year of anything simply isn’t a career asset. It’s a smudge on a resume, and definitely a no-sale when going for other jobs.
Consider this as a scenario at a job interview:
“Why did you leave Amazon?”
“I couldn’t stand the place, the culture or the working conditions.”
“Next applicant, please.”
Whether that high turnover, employees as French fries sort of environment’s going to attract the best and brightest, therefore, is highly debatable. That’s one of the real nail-studded baseball bats in this NYT article. Does Amazon need good people? Yes, which is why this epic tale of employee misery is so serious for the company.
Corporate realism?
CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, is famous for his hard line on working conditions. Amazon warehouses are famous for tough requirements, including security checks, and demanding performance requirements, all the way down to how fast a box is packed.
What the NYT article misses, however, is that Amazon is also a version of corporate reality which is very familiar to top of the line US and international executives. Apple has a very similar culture, as I reported in a previous DJ article which listed examples of a more or less identical range of issues.
A few points about Amazon culture and business to create a working context:
Amazon is unique. There’s nothing quite like it, and it was the first true global retailer.
Amazon is complex. This gigantic business is also covering a vast range of different types of operations, products, and probably millions of external people working with them. Relationships can create expensive problems, internally and externally.
Amazon is vulnerable to a virtual dictionary of potential issues. This is a huge money environment, which can lead to serious risks of fraud, liabilities, and similar expensive situations at any second.
Amazon has issues and situations which simply aren’t on media radar. The NYT perspective is based on a straightforward view of employment, rather than the complexities of behind the scenes problems. It’s a bit simplistic to simply cite cases of employee angst, justified as some cases seem to be, and assume that’s the whole story. It isn’t, and this back end reality impacts directly on individuals. Not everyone is a saint.
So if Bezos is inclined to the draconian methods of management, he has at least a few plausible reasons to do things like that. It’s his baby, and ultimately the buck is his, wherever it stops. The hard line approach, in fact, is one of the few options that makes sense where so many things can go wrong.
Image problems?
The NYT piece isn’t a bottom line issue. People will buy from Amazon regardless. It is an image issue. Amazon received a lot of kudos for its core innovations as an online retailer, and earned due respect. Image, however, has a shelf life. The formerly very popular Apple got just about everyone’s nerves with its range of image problems, from faulty iPhones and iffy customer service to a culture of internal burnouts and perceived failure to address the issues of manufacturing in China.
The corporate culture in which both Amazon and Apple are enmeshed isn’t at all popular with consumers. It’s seen as a 1 percent culture, in which people are valueless throwaways. Amazon has now been heavily tarred with this image. This has happened despite Amazon’s Principles of Leadership, which is a pretty straightforward, if somewhat rigid and very broad, set of rules by which Amazonians are expected to work. They’re actually expected to cite these rules, too, as the basis of principles for their own work.
Being seen as a corporate ogre isn’t good for business. Amazon is a job creator, and has definitely done some good in creating a price structure for products which is actually quite advanced, and pro-consumer. Image problems, however, can be as bad for business as they were McDonalds, which has basically had to retool and reshape itself into a credible food supplier in the face of massive criticism.
Amazon is also vulnerable to criticisms of how it does business. The company is now moving in to the mainstream shopping center demographic, and according to Motley Fool, likely to destroy old style retailers in the process.
It can therefore also be seen as a destroyer of outside jobs, too simply by being Amazon. As you can see, this image problem is as complex as Amazon itself. Add the “workplace gulag effect” to the mix, and it’s not a good look.
The pity of it is that Amazon, overall, in a less hyper mode, focusing on its core business, would have a good business image. The savage internal dynamics don’t seem to contribute much more than churnover and a lot of stories. They don’t however seem to be delivering more business for Amazon. It’s hard to see this high tension, obviously painful working environment as genuinely productive.
Backstabbing and burnouts may be a part of business, but a culture of misanthropic mindlessly busy conformists has never done much for anyone. The rules have created their antithesis — if everyone’s too damn scared to be creative, where does the innovation come from?
A bit of unasked-for advice — a business which tears down the people who do the work can only hurt itself. If this workplace environment is stifling innovation and brainstorming, it’s dangerous to the business. Lose the conformists and get back to the two rules that makes sense — “Disagree and Commit” and “Deliver Results.”
Talk is cheap. Try doing a valuation on a conversation. It won’t be in the KPIs, colleague feedback or the reports. It’ll be in hard deliverables. That’s where Amazon is going off the rails.
