Amazon not a toxic workplace: CEO.
Urges employees to contact him about incidents
Amazon said that it would not tolerate the “shockingly callous management practices” that were described in an article in the New York Times over the weekend. Jeff Bezos, the retail giant’s founder and chief executive, said he did not recognize the workplace portrayed in the article and urged any employees who knew of “stories like those reported” to contact him directly.
“Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero,” Bezos said in an email circulated to all the retailer’s employees late Sunday.
The article gave accounts of workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises who said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover in Amazon’s intense and fast-paced workplace.
Bezos wrote that he “very much” hoped that workers did not recognize the workplace depicted in the article — “a soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard.”
At Amazon, the article said, the winners get the thrill of testing new projects with hundreds of millions of customers. They also become rich through a stock that has increased tenfold since 2008.
But the losers are pushed out in regular cullings. One former Amazon human resources director called it “purposeful Darwinism.”
Amazon declined a request to interview Bezos for the original article but made several executives available. Overall, The Times interviewed more than 100 current and former Amazon employees, including many who spoke on the record and some who requested anonymity because they had signed agreements saying they would not speak to the media.
According to early executives and employees, 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 rigour. 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 can’t choose two out of three,” Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders and which still serves as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned them, “It’s not easy to work here.”
In The Times’ article, Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”
Bezos urged his 180,000 employees to give The Times article “a careful read” but said it “doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”
Amazon and Bezos have also circulated an account on LinkedIn by Nick Ciubotariu, an Amazon engineer and manager, describing his 18 months at the company. Like many of the Amazon employees quoted in The Times article, Ciubotariu describes strengths of the workplace, including focus on customers and innovation. He also quotes an unnamed senior executive telling an all-hands meeting, “Amazon used to burn a lot of people into the ground.”