Amazon: Deleting Workers to Serve You Better

Amid epic financial performance, customer service teams face shock layoffs

Update: since this newsletter was published, Amazon have confirmed the story, denied that it impacts the number of people mentioned here, but refused to confirm the number who are impacted. Additional sources within the company place the estimated impact at 600-800 jobs. None of the other factual assertions within this piece are challenged.

I’ve always told people that even as Amazon’s corporate behavior changes, I will continue to believe it’s the same company underneath it all unless I see specific signals to the contrary.

Today, one of those signals appeared as Amazon slashed customer service resources.

In a move that has not yet been publicized, Amazon is restructuring its worldwide Customer Service (CS) workforce, and in doing so eliminating around 1,000 salaried roles.

To understand the nature of the firings, a little context is helpful.

The Amazonians you deal with when you contact CS are associates (CSAs), the frontline workers who resolve issues when things go wrong. Sometimes you’ll encounter a resolution specialist, which is an experienced and skilled CSA with more authority to help. CSAs do some of the most demanding work of anyone in the company.

Every team of 20-25 CSAs is managed by a Team Manager. This is a line manager with responsibility to support, develop, engage, coach, motivate, equip, assess, and generally lead a team. Managers make sure associates get paid on time, remove barriers to their performance, approve their holidays, assign and organize their work, and ensure any administrative requirements impacting them are handled. They are the face of Amazon for their team. Their jobs have high pace and long hours, typically 50-60 per week even if their contract says less.

Every 3-5 Team Managers is led by a Group Manager. And every 3-5 Group Managers is led by an Operations Manager. These roles are similarly taxing, with direct supervision responsibilities happening alongside programmatic and strategic functions to keep the organization healthy and progressing in its maturation. These managers all work extremely long and full hours.

Which is what makes it inexplicable that someone reviewing a business case in Seattle believes they are surplus to requirements.

The change unfolding within Amazon today is that, effective immediately, the Group Manager role is being eliminated from the organization. Not adjusted, not modified, not reorganized. Simply deprecated. The logic, support, and foundation for why this is advisable were not shared with anyone.

That’s roughly a thousand salaried managers contributing 50-60k labor hours per week supporting the company’s customer service operation.

Gone by sundown.

Workload is not being reduced. No duties are being taken away from the organization. Nothing else changes. In fact, business is booming. It continues to grow.

Which of course means that Amazon is once again engaging in the torturous illogic of “more with less.” Which is executive lingo for “something for nothing.” Change the circumstances a bit and it’s simply called “theft.” In this case, managers who were just given a base pay freeze a month ago will now work harder to take an inflation-adjusted pay cut.

You can almost hear the faint echo of “let them eat cake.”

And not only are Amazon’s executives sweating from their teeth to claw at a few more grubby wads of cash, they’re doing so through the point of a particularly autocratic bayonet in this case.

Multiple people inside the loop tell me this is happening under the following conditions:

• Zero prior discussion or debate about impact to employees or customers.

• No notice or warning. It was a complete shock to individuals impacted and their teams.

• No feedback loop. Amazon is not asking for inputs from managers in the field about how the firings are impacting them or their teams. They’ve been told to basically button up and get on with it.

• No support. The Operations Managers of Amazon CS just inherited a new role and already put in full weeks. No one is explaining how they should navigate this massive growth in workload.

• Totally embargoed. They’re being told to not talk about this with anyone, including one another.

Just what the world needed. Another executive brainwave so good and right and so genius that you can’t even talk about it.

But if you think that’s bad, the worst is how Amazon have elected to do this.

Imagine sitting at your desk at 8 AM ready to start your shift. You’ve had a good night’s sleep, pushed aside distractions, organized yourself, watered your plants, and fed your cat. You’re working toward a smile. Set to deliver a solid day of support to your team as they make customer service real for Amazon’s membership.

But for some reason, you can’t log into your computer. Your credentials aren’t working. You try your password repeatedly. You try changing it. You get locked out. You curse. Your cat hisses. You’re about to dial IT for help when your phone rings.

It’s your boss. She tells you there is a reason you can’t log in. That reason is you no longer work for Amazon. You’re being let go. This is your last day. In fact, this is your last conversation.

Grim, isn’t it.

This is what unfolded for hundreds of people today. Previously treated to the comedically gold idea that they work for “Earth’s Best Employer,” they are being ambushed, dismissed, and treated as disposable.

Oh, except in countries where Group Managers have unionized or are protected by labor laws which prevent them being tossed out like used coffee grounds as a corporate convenience.

In those environments, Amazon is moving the employees laterally to open roles. Which proves Amazon could choose to do this with everyone. But does so only when forced.

Why? So CEO Andy Jassy can brag on earnings calls and in shareholder letters that the company is really good at reducing costs. For some reason, he always leaves out the bit about ransacking his own workforce to find those reductions, and never mentions how the chosen manner of doing so defiles Amazon’s own stated value system.

I will only say a few more things before closing, because I have long since strayed over the line dividing fact from opinion, and opinion from polemic.

Nonetheless, these things should be said. And I know Amazon will neither say them nor allow them to be said.

From a business perspective, this latest move strikes two chords for me.

One is myopia. Amazon has always resisted cutting beyond perceived fat and into its key muscle to find money, and there is no more key muscle than its customer service organization. Creating love and joy for customers is what birthed and grew this company. That organization is the mechanism to continue delivering it. Stepping away from it now tells us nothing is sacred.

Or perhaps less dramatically, it tells us Amazon is less interested in customer obsession than it used to be. Anyone who has done business with Amazon over the years has already noticed a decline.

This is where that decline will start to become a plummet, because you cannot expect strong execution with mediocre support, and support to front line managers is what Amazon is cutting here.

Stretching remaining managers on the rack will harm both the manager and associate experience. Which will harm the customer experience. And if Amazon had the evidence to suggest that wasn’t a risk, it would have shared the data with its own teams and invited a debate on how to proceed.

Then again, there is not enough psychological safety in an environment of surprise firings for people to challenge much.

Which brings me to the second chord I hear in this signal: arrogance. Amazon’s senior executives are so busy being fawned over by financiers and stock market gurus that they’ve begun reading their own press clippings.

These actions smack of impunity. Of doing whatever the hell they want without regard for values, principles, human tolls, or even long-term consequences. There is always a moment in every story of corporate implosion where we glimpsed the arrogance of power run amok but didn’t realize all that it implied. Mark the tape, because I expect some day we will come back to this moment and have that discussion.

I also expect that in the years to come, or maybe even the months, CS will lose its grip on the customer experience. Senior executives won’t immediately notice this because everyone is increasingly afraid to tell them inconvenient truths, lest they be next on the list to clear out their desks.

But the degradation will at some point impact the bottom line. Then and only then, this move will get reversed, likely at far greater cost than anything it saved. Affixed with a euphemistic label, it’ll be passed off as an innovation rather than a remedy.

There’s a lot more I could say.

Like, it’s disgusting to fire people with no notice just because you can.

Like, it reeks of intellectual cowardice to leave your people totally out of the loop on a decision which impacts their basic working conditions and resources.

Like, I used to say it’s not Amazonian to avoid being challenged on something until it’s too late, because that’s not what smart company cultures look like. But I can’t say that anymore because it’s become a feature rather than a bug.

Like, removing someone’s computer access as a way to introduce them to being ambushed with unemployment is shameful, and the product of a sick mind.

Like, when people don’t feel safe in their work environment, you will never get their best effort. Because they are preoccupied with restoring safety, and until they do so, will remain miserable. And nothing undercuts safety like watching your colleagues get inhumanly deleted.

In a world where things made sense, Amazon would be forbidden from ever again mentioning mental health or psychological resiliency. If you don’t want people to become so irrational and desperate that they consider harming themselves, simply refrain from abusive actions like the one you perpetrated today.

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Earlier this week, Jason Del Rey wrote in Fortune Magazine about Amazon’s recent ascendancy as an increasingly all-powerful corporation perched to dominate across several lines of business.

He titled the article “This is the Amazon Everyone Should Have Feared,” referencing the company’s formidable business prowess and market position.

In the article, Mr. Jassy gloats about how Amazon has become rich and powerful enough that it can grow, invest, and capture profit simultaneously.

It’s understandable he might be getting a little power drunk after a $30B year and a $10B quarter counted while sitting atop a mountain of record cash flow. Even more understandable when you realize he actually thinks he is responsible individually for that profit rather than his workers generating it.

But we will soon start to test whether great power can last in an organization absent the embrace of great responsibility. When an employer chooses to be responsible, it gives its people basic decency, respect, and intellectual equality in the workplace.

This employer doesn’t do that anymore. This employer is both rich and powerful beyond control and simultaneously irresponsible.

That is indeed an Amazon everyone should fear.

TC is an independent writer and expert on organizational leadership.