TORONTO — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is on the defensive following a New York Times exposé on the online retailer’s reportedly brutal workplace culture.
The piece is based on accounts of more than 100 former and current Amazon employees, who detail an unhealthy environment of high competition and pressure. “Workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s 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 article states.
Those high expectations caused a woman who was battling breast cancer to be in danger of being fired, according to the piece, because “‘difficulties’ in her ‘personal life’ had interfered with fulfilling her work goals.” Another employee was given a low performance rating after returning from treatment for her thyroid cancer. Others who suffered miscarriages and stillbirths reported similar experiences.
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But it’s not just women (who seem to be grossly underrepresented at the company) who have spoken out. “Some fathers at Amazon said they considered quitting because of pressure from bosses to spend less time with their families.”
The company, which last month “eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion,” offers no paid paternity leave.
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Aside from an apparent lack of work-life balance, things can also get quite cutthroat at the office — to the point of Survivor-style alliances. There’s a feedback tool, for instance, that “allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management.
“Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else…Many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly.”
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One staff member, who’s worked in a management position at Amazon for 18 months, has publicly come out in defense of the company, publishing a long rebuttal to the article on LinkedIn.
The company’s founder — who’s previously admitted “it’s not easy” to work at Amazon — issued his own memo to staff Sunday night. In it, Bezos said he doesn’t recognize the “soulless, dystopian workplace where no fun is had and no laughter heard” portrayed in the New York Times article. He added that Amazon won’t tolerate the “shockingly callous management practices.”
“Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
“I don’t think any company adopting the approach portrayed could survive, much less thrive, in today’s highly competitive tech hiring market. The people we hire here are the best of the best…
“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.”
SOUND OFF: Do you have any horror stories about a former workplace? Share them in the comments section below.
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