Companies need workplace values, not breakdowns
Is there a best workplace culture for producing a high-growth, innovative company? Does a large company have to have a harsh work environment to stay as hungry as a startup? I’ve wondered about this since reading the weekend New York Times article on Amazon that could have been headlined, “The Hunger Games of Seattle.”
Silicon Valley embraces the idea of “meritocracy,” but Amazon sounds like meritocracy gone berserk.
The article portrayed the e-commerce giant as a Darwinian nightmare of relentless work demands, routine backstabbing and general insensitivity to workers’ lives. “Amazon is where
overachievers go to feel bad about themselves,” is the oft-repeated quote from the article. People crying at their desk after a verbal lashing for failing to meet expectations is apparently routine.
I typically don’t feel sorry for well-paid workers who labor in air-conditioned office towers. But I felt queasy reading about managers sabotaging colleagues with scathing criticism in order to make a grab for each others’ subordinates. “You drown someone in the deep end of the pool,” is how one employee described it.
Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s chief executive, objected to the characterization of Amazon’s work culture as toxic.
“I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company,” he said in a memo.
Support from peers
Some tech leaders, including Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s co-founder, and Dick Costolo, formerly Twitter’s CEO, have come to the defense of Amazon, which was founded in 1994.
Andreessen, responding to a New York Times headline asking what it is like to work at Amazon, tweeted, “Well, given the number of workplaces designed for underachievers to feel good about themselves …”
Costolo said the portrayal struck him as “hyperbole.”
Silicon Valley is known for some hard-charging environments where getting called on the carpet is a daily event. Apple, under Steve Jobs, wasn’t always easy. Intel’s Andy Grove cultivated a workplace where all employees were encouraged to speak their minds, even if co-workers were offended. Packard and other tech firms dabbled in the “rank and yank” or stacked ranking
Bezos CEO objected to a New York Times article’s description of Amazon workplace. style of cleaning house that was described in the article about Amazon.
But other successful tech companies have produced distinct work cultures that also include the idea of rewarding high-performers. Collaboration, sharing of information and respect for work-home boundaries can be cultivated even with an intense startup mentality driven by data.
Companies, more and more, need to stand for something beyond just making money to appeal to customers. At Google, where openness and transparency are valued, employees gather on Fridays to hear the latest from the CEO about the company’s direction. Intuit, the maker of Quicken, is focused on encouraging creativity. Twitter, which hangs a “Love Where You Work” sign at its headquarters, engenders pride in its mission to “give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.”
The culture — not just good pay and perks — influences where people want to work and establish careers. And harsh working conditions, particularly for white-collar workers with options in a tight labor market, aren’t conducive to employee retention.
“Amazon may have been able to succeed as it has in the short term because it has sort of a monopoly situation in the marketplace,” said Robert Levering, cofounder of the Great Place to Work Institute, which produces the “100 Best Companies to Work For” list that appears in Fortune. “But they don’t have a monopoly on the labor market.”
Amazon isn’t on the list of Levering’s best places to work.
On Glassdoor, a jobs site where current employees and former workers rank companies on various metrics, Amazon has a 2.7 work-life balance rating so far this year (out of 5, which means employees are “very satisfied”), down from 3.4 in the first quarter of 2009. “That is below average,” said Glassdoor career trends analyst Scott Dobroski.
Lower than rivals
The company’s overall rating is 3.4. But that drops in the Bay Area, where Amazon has several operations, including its Lab126 hardware group in Cupertino. Granted there is a much smaller pool of workers here. Still, 15 San Jose area Amazon employees gave the company an overall rating of 2.7. In San Francisco, 23 employees gave the firm 3.1. Amazon ranks lower than Bay Area tech rivals Google, Facebook and Twitter. (For this year, 753 employees at Apple in the San Jose metro area give the iPhone maker a 3.7 rating.)
“There are so many attractive places to work in tech,” Dobroski said. “For employees locally, the company has some work to do.”
Amazon does have a strong leader in Bezos. He needs to be sure that Amazon’s culture, in all corners of the company, is something he can stand by.
Many people long to work at Amazon at its best, a place with a big mission to serve customers and reinvent markets. High stress can be worth it if the mission is important enough and if employees feel they are pulling together and getting satisfaction out of the work they do. But any job, whether in a warehouse or in a cubicle, can quickly become a drag if it is politicized and employees don’t trust each other.
Many Silicon Valley firms are workplace-culture role models that value candor, hard work and a sense of purpose. Drowning people in the deep end of the pool doesn’t need to be in the employee handbook.