Not Earth's Best Employer

Amazon office policy casts doubt on company value system

It will not be common practice for me to critique my former employer in this newsletter. I learned a lot during my time at Amazon. It was a positive experience which ended on a successful and amicable note.

However.

I also value truth over complicit silence.

I learned during my time at Amazon about the need to be vocally self-critical. Sometimes we need a little encouragement to be self-accountable.

Since Amazon won’t critique itself on a particular issue without additional encouragement, I’m happy to provide a little nudge. A nudge those most impacted by the issue don’t feel safe to provide given prior statements by its senior-most executives.

Let’s start this critique by imagining a world where working from home (WFH), hybrid working, and flexible work schedules have been embraced by Amazon, not least because these policies allowed it to innovate through the pandemic and make a lot of money along the way.

In this world, Amazon has a liberal attitude about the amount of time corporate employees spend in the office so long as they are delivering their roles. Line managers are free to be as permissive in this regard as they see fit, consistent with business requirements.

In this world, many employees have shaped their lives around the practice of hybrid or distant working, reassured by their bosses that even after the end of the pandemic, there will be no rush to pull everyone back into the office.

And in this world, many people are promoted or hired into roles where it is accepted they will work physically from one location despite the listing of another location as their “home base.”

Good faith and trust are prevalent features of this world, and common sense working arrangements are normalized.

If you understand this world, you understand life as a corporate Amazonian during and just after the pandemic.

This arrangement made sense. It worked well for a broader range of employees, particularly women, helping to diversify the corporate workforce by creating an environment where commute time could often be plowed into a more sustainable work/life balance and requirements could be juggled.

Then, that world changed.

Amazon struggled after the pandemic to realign to what it perceived as a reduced demand forecast across most of its businesses.

Share price dropped, part of an overall decline in market investment driven by inflation and other economic pressures.

Two things followed.

First, corporate staffs were restructured, resulting in many thousands of Amazonians losing their jobs despite a two-year gross profit of more than $420B.

Second, cost control became an obsession for senior corporate officers. One manifestation of this was a new urgency to get corporate staffers into office buildings, ensuring the ballast of sunk costs into these company cathedrals was counterweighted by enough utilization to justify their existence.

Soon, Amazon’s rhetoric inverted itself from what we heard during the pandemic. Rather than herald hybrid working as a key innovation, executives began chanting about the modernist ideal of physical togetherness in the workplace.

Then, something truly remarkable happened.

Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, took on the task of personally advancing, advocating, and enforcing the Return to Office (RTO) policy.

The mind boggles to comprehend how someone running a company as globally essential, dynamic, and relentlessly busy as Amazon found time to descend into the weed-level altitude of corporate timekeeping. Especially in a context where company performance was a dire enough issue that it needed to fire people it only just hired months before.

But there he was. Visibly managing an issue which should barely make the radar scope of a mid-level manager.

Why would the CEO of Amazon do this?

We’ll come back to that question.

Suffice to say Jassy’s personal involvement led to a range of unfortunate yet utterly predictable pratfalls. One might even say it devolved into a clown show.

First, there was a public kerfuffle, with Jassy channeling his inner Tony Soprano, telling employees challenging the policy that “it’s probably not going to work out” for those who fail to comply. Yikes.

Such strong words from the high tower of the company produced immense pressure which has cascaded down the spine of Amazon, intensifying with the passage of each vertebrae.

Now there are tracking mechanisms. Reports. Metrics. Compliance levels and trends being watched obsessively and acted upon by very senior people. All to hammer the corporate workforce into compliance.

Never mind offices are bursting at the seams now that managers are taking attendance. In London, Amazon has had to rent overflow office space. So much for cost control.

There is a newfound eagerness for physical presence.

And that’s because promotion reviews, performance assessments, and compensation processes are all digesting information about individual RTO compliance. Don’t comply, your career will be derailed. Comply with less spirit than someone else and you may fall behind.

When something is a CEO issue, anyone less than perfectly compliant will be like a nail sticking out of a board, and they will be hammered back into place. Because when something is a CEO edict rather than something managed by managers, there is no flexibility.

Some will think hey, they are paid by Amazon, if the company wants them in the office, what’s the big deal?

Well, in principle, that sounds OK. In practice, when pesky human circumstances and non-linearity get involved, it’s a mess.

For example. Let’s say Bill took a role as a regional learning manager during the pandemic. His office location was listed as Nashville but he lives in Memphis. Upon taking the role, he asked if he would need to move to Nashville after the pandemic, and was reassured this would not be necessary.

After the pandemic, though his job didn’t materially require it, he made the trip to Nashville a couple times a week to be with the larger team.

Now, he’s being told he needs to move to Nashville permanently because he needs to be in the office as a default and the company will no longer pay his travel expenses to make the 400-mile round trip from his current home.

What does Bill do in this situation?

He quits.

A strong performer with important experience, he calculates that he’s better off jumping into the job market instead of uprooting his family, selling his house, and unmooring from his community. Especially now that he sees how changeably his company treats prior assurances and how unstable it will allow expectations to become.

And this is maybe the point.

I promised we would circle back to why Jassy would put his own gargantuan thumb on this tiny scale, instantly shifting the hybrid working climate from permissive to non-permissive.

The reason is totally rational.

The layoffs of early ‘23 were not enough. The company still saw itself as overstaffed. It was still working to reduce the sizes of corporate and operational teams.

So … if those deeply unpopular, publicly toxic staff cuts were merely a good start and you need to get rid of more people, you don’t avoid pissing them off with dumb policies.

In fact, you flood the environment with enough frustration to create ambivalence, and then you provide a few strategically placed irritants to trigger voluntary departures. RTO is triggering resignations of really good people, and yet it continues … because talent loss aligns with corporate interest at this moment in time.

This is the only theory I can imagine which explains why superb people are being quietly escorted to the back door of Amazon and permitted (often paid) to leave without a fight to retain them. This is a tectonic shift in company culture.

There are two main problems arising from this approach.

First, the people who choose to leave will often be the best performers, as they have the highest confidence about succeeding in the job market and often the greatest degree of commitment about defending their families, principles, and dignity. So this could catalyze a brain drain which dilutes performance, totally eating any savings from downsizing.

Second, such chicanery is at odds with Amazon’s values, made explicit in its leadership principles. One of those principles is “Strive to Become Earth’s Best Employer.” Reducing your own talent index by being tactical, threatening employees, and corroding trust by moving the goalposts … these are curious methods to reach this objective.

Amazon is courting disaster. You cannot sustain a market-leading position without market-leading talent. Nor can you remain strategically solvent while selectively defiling your own value system for the sake of short-term objectives. Once people realize your values are meaningless under pressure, they will cease to many anything to anyone. And at that point, the hourglass of your doom has been turned over.

I can't tell you how pervasive what I’ve described is. Only that I know it's happened many times. And if even once, it is (a) dead wrong, as well as (b) very dumb.

Policies that give people no meaningful choice but to quit their jobs are nothing more than constructive dismissals or redundancies.

Amazon should fix this. But in the meantime it should be scrutinized. A company with this much global power and influence needs to do better.

TC is an experienced senior manager and former Amazonian. He is passionate about the relationship between organizational culture, fulfillment, and operational performance.