CASE STUDY:

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

SEATTLE On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazons singular way of working.

They are told to forget the poor habits they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they hit the wall from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: Climb the wall, others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, Im Peculiar the companys proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one anothers ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are unreasonably high. The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one anothers bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.)

Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioners blade, said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change.

On a recent morning, as Amazons new hires waited to begin orientation, few of them seemed to appreciate the experiment in which they had enrolled. Only one, Keith Ketzle, a freckled Texan triathlete with an M.B.A., lit up with recognition, explaining how he left his old, lumbering company for a faster, grittier one.

Conflict brings about innovation, he said.

A Philosophy of Work

According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.

The result was the leadership principles, the articles of faith that describe the way Amazonians should act. In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.

The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers (principle No. 5: Hire and develop the best) who hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from the forces red tape, office politics that keep them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit ownership (No. 2), or mastery of every element of their businesses, and dive deep, (No. 12) or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.

The workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who is really achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as athletes with endurance, speed (No. 8: bias for action), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits (No. 7: think big).

You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you cant choose two out of three, Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders, when the company sold only books, and which still serves as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned them, Its not easy to work here.

Turnover at Amazon

Amazons turnover rate among front-line workers was at least double the industry average during the initial months of the coronavirus pandemic, reinforcing the view among some critics that the Seattle commerce giant churns through workers.

It also raises questions about the role of automation a major strategy Amazon has employed in the last five years to drive speed and efficiency in employee retention. Some researchers say increasing automation may be a driver of higher turnover rates, while also reducing companies turnover costs in hiring and training replacement workers. During a nearly seven-month stretch this year, several hundred thousand people stopped working for Amazon in the U.S., even as it hired hundreds of thousands of others.

Motivating the Amabots

Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. If youre a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot, said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. The company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff, said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.

The process begins when Amazons legions of recruiters identify thousands of job prospects each year, who face extra screening by bar raisers, star employees and part-time interviewers charged with ensuring that only the best are hired. As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects, whether selling wine or testing the delivery of packages straight to shoppers car trunks.

Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the companys marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.

Questions:

1. How do you think amazon manages change?

2. What kind of effect does organizational conflict have on amazon? What can be its drawbacks?

3. What kind of leadership style does the company promote?

4. How is job description related to performance?

5. Does Amazon has high turnover? If yes than what can be its cause?

6. How does the Amazon keeps the productivity at its maximum?

7. How does technology help in human resource management?

8. Kindly describe the best HR practices of Amazon and also suggest or recommend what kind of practices does Amazon need to implement.