Behind the Scenes of Amazon: Fighting for Big Ideas in an Insecure Working Environment

The company is conducting an experiment: how much can one oppress office workers in the struggle to achieve ever-increasing company plans

On Monday morning, new employees line up for an introductory lecture, which should catapult them into the wonderful world of work on Amazon. They are instructed to forget bad habits acquired at previous jobs. When they get tired of the working pace and “press into the wall,” there is only one way out of this: “Climb the wall!”.

To become the best amazonschikami, they need to follow the 14 principles of leadership, which are applied to comfortable laminated cards. Those who in a few days will correctly answer the questions of the questionnaire will receive a virtual award “I am special” - a proud phrase denoting the overthrow of working traditions.


Amazon is building new offices in Seattle - in three years they will be able to accommodate 50,000 employees
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At Amazon, workers are encouraged to criticize other people's ideas at meetings, stay up late (emails arrive after midnight, followed by SMS with questions about why you didn’t respond to emails), and adhere to standards that the company's bosses boast, “ unreasonably high. ” In the telephone directory of the company there is an instruction on how to secretly send feedback to the bosses of other employees. Workers claim that this system is often used to sabotage. There are examples in the instructions, in particular: "I am concerned about his lack of due flexibility and the fact that he openly complains about minor assignments."

Many newcomers coming on Monday can quit in a few years. Lucky workers invent innovations offered to users and make fortunes on soaring promotions. Losers quit, or they are fired in annual thinning of staff - “intentional Darwinism,” as one of the former directors of the HR department at Amazon said. Some employees who suffered from cancer, miscarriages, and other personal problems say they were unjustly assessed or removed from work, instead of giving them time to recover.

While the company is testing the delivery of drones and ways to update the stocks of toilet paper at the touch of a button in the bathroom, an invisible experiment is being conducted to check the maximum workload of office workers, which changes the limits of acceptable. In the company that he founded and which Jeff Bezos still runs, they reject banal management methods that in other companies are at least subject to discussion. Instead, there is a system that workers call an intricate machine that raises the company to the heights of Bezos’s ever-increasing ambitions.

“This company is committed to doing really big, innovative and breakthrough things - and this is not easy,” said Susan Harker, the company's main recruiter. - When you set your sights on high, work becomes difficult. And some people do not cope. "

Bo Olson is one of those. He lasted less than two years in the advertising department of books, and said that he tolerated the sight of people crying in the office — and others also spoke about this. “You get out of the meeting room and see a grown man cover his face,” he says. “Almost everyone I worked with, I saw weeping in the workplace.”

Thanks to, among other things, the ability to squeeze everything out of employees, Amazon’s position is as strong as ever. His swelling campus becomes a 10-million-square-foot bet that thousands of new employees can sell to anyone, anything, anywhere. Last month, the company overshadowed Walmart, becoming the most expensive retailer in the country, with a capitalization of $ 250 billion, and Forbes announced Bezos fifth in the list of the richest people on Earth.

Tens of millions of Americans are familiar with Amazon as customers, but the work of the company's offices remains shrouded in secrecy. Secrecy is needed - even lower-level employees sign long non-disclosure agreements. The company gave permission to only a few senior managers to talk with journalists for this article, and in an interview with Bezos and other directors refused.

However, more than 100 current and past Amazons, members of the leadership team, personnel directors, marketing specialists, sales professionals, and engineers who worked on projects ranging from Kindle to food delivery, described how they sometimes tried to make friends with extremely difficult conditions. working with what they call an "exciting opportunity to create."

Some admitted in an interview that they were doing well in the company because it pushed them beyond their limits. Many are motivated by “dreaming more and knowing that we have barely dived into the abyss of possible inventions,” says Elizabeth Rommel, director of retail, who was allowed to be interviewed.

Those who got into the company and left it, say that the knowledge they gained as part of their work helped spur their career. Many who escaped from there said that they later realized that they were addicted to the Amazonian way of working.

“Many people working in the company feel tense. This is the best job I've ever hated, ”says John Rossman, a former director who published The Way of the Amazon.

A company may be unique, but not the same as it claims. It just reacts a little faster to changes that others are beginning to feel: data that allows you to constantly measure employee performance, fragile relations between employers and employees, constant competition in which empires appear and disappear every day. Amazon is at the forefront of transforming office work with new technologies; it is more agile and more productive, but also more rigid and unforgiving.

"Organizations are raising the bar, forcing teams to work more for less money to cope with competitors, or just constantly striving forward," says Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps businesses of the old way become more modern and responsive to change.

That morning, when fresh employees were waiting for the start of the introductory presentation, few of them fully understood what experiment they were in. Only Kate Ketsl, a freckled athlete with an MBA, told with enthusiasm how he left the old and clumsy company to a faster and more courageous one. “Conflict brings innovation with it,” he says.


Employee picnic

Working philosophy

Jeff Bezos turned to data-based management quite early.

In his graduation speech at Princeton in 2010, he remembered that he somehow wanted his grandmother to quit smoking. He did not beg and did not persuade, he simply calculated that each puff takes a few minutes of life, and told her that she had reduced her life by nine years. She burst into tears. He was then 10 years old.

A few decades later, he created a technology and retail giant working on the same principles. He seeks to tell others how to behave. He is overly confident in the power of metrics and measurements, having experience in the early 1990s at the financial firm DE Shaw, which turned the usual working style of Wall Street, using algorithms that allow you to get the maximum profit from each transaction.

Early workers and directors say that Bezos, almost from the very founding of the company, was determined in 1994 to fight what, in his opinion, is ruining business - with bureaucracy, waste, lack of accuracy. As the company grew, he wanted to encode his ideas about how it should work, in instructions, some of which would be counterintuitive. At the same time, they were supposed to be simple enough for newcomers to understand, common enough for all areas of business that he wanted to enter, and accurate enough to weed out the mediocrity he was so afraid of.

As a result, we got the “leadership principles”, which describe how the company should act. In contrast with those firms whose philosophies are rather vague, Amazon has rules that are written into the company's language and rituals. They are used in hiring, they are quoted at meetings and written on distribution lines in the dining room. Some company employees teach their children about them.

The instructions require hiring the best workers (rule No. 5), who expect a lot from each other, and are exempt from various restrictions that prevent them from achieving this. Employees must demonstrate ownership (rule No. 2), or masterful knowledge of all aspects of their business, and “dig deep” (No. 12), that is, find hidden ideas that will help correct problems or come up with services before customers even ask about of them.

The workplace must be transparent and accurately reflect who achieves results and who does not. In Amazon, ideal workers are described as athletes with high stamina, speed (No. 8 “propensity to act”), efficiency that can be measured and the ability to challenge constraints (No. 7 “dream more”).

“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you cannot choose two of the three,” Bezos wrote in 1997 in his letter to shareholders, when the company sold only books. When hiring employees, he always warned them that "it is not easy to work here."

Rossman said that Bezos told at a meeting in 2003 that he did not want to turn the company into a “country club” like Microsoft. “In this case, we will die,” he said.

Although the company's campus is similar to that of other technology giants — offices with the ability to bring their dog, mostly young men, their own farmers market, and joyful posters — the company is considered something separate from that. Google and Facebook motivate employees with gymnasiums, lunches and benefits like bonuses to young parents. As Google says, "we take care of everything to you."

Amazon does not pretend that feeding employees is their priority. For compensation you have to fight. Successful middle managers can receive dividends in the amount of an entire salary from stocks that have risen almost 10 times since 2008. But workers must be “thrift” (No. 9), starting from desktops and ending with telephones and travel expenses, which they often pay for themselves. No free buffets and snacks. All are focused on the constant desire to please customers, or “customer obsession” (# 1).

According to colleagues, with the growth of the company, Bezos increasingly adhered to its principles, raising them almost to the rank of morality. “My main job is to help preserve the company's culture,” Bezos said last year at a conference of one of his projects.

Most of all, his belief that achieving harmony in the workplace is overvalued stands out - they say she stifles honest criticism and encourages polite praise for bad ideas. The Amazons are forced to “disagree and force” (No. 13), to tear apart the ideas of colleagues, giving out such reviews, which can even be painful for the authors of ideas.

“We aim to get the right answer,” said Tony Galbato, vice president of HR. “Of course, it would be much easier to find a compromise and not argue, but this could lead to a wrong decision.”

And in the best moments, Amazon is a lively idea Bezos - a place where ideas are subjected to severe tests. Workers say that their colleagues are the most stubborn and strict of all that they had. Even new employees can bring in a lot. For example, a simple engineer Daniel Bahmüller took part in the project of delivering goods by drones.

Last August, Stephanie Landry, process director, discussed with everyone how to shorten the delivery time and came up with the idea of ​​how to deliver goods to city buyers within an hour. 111 days later in Brooklyn, she led the launch of a new service, Prime Now.

“The customer managed to buy Elsa’s (Frozen) doll, which they could not find in New York stores, and get her at home in 23 minutes,” says Landry.

This was made possible, according to the workers, with full adherence to the principles of leadership. “We are trying to solve the practical problems of customers,” says Landry. “And in such a way that it looks magical or futuristic.”

Motivating "Amabotov"

The old-timers of the company say that its genius is that it forces them to force themselves. “Good Amazons are becoming Amabot,” said one employee, meaning that workers merge with the system into a single whole.

In the Amazon warehouses, workers are monitored by a sophisticated electronic system that checks that they pack a sufficient number of orders per hour. Amazon caused a scandal in 2011, when workers at a warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania were working with more than 37-degree heat, and outside there was a queue of ambulances that picked up employees who had fallen from a heatstroke. Only after a local newspaper conducted a journalistic investigation, did the company decide to install air conditioners.

In offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing management system and psychological tools to push new achievements to tens of thousands of office workers. “The company has a continuous algorithm to improve employee performance,” said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle advertiser.

The process begins when an army of recruiters selects thousands of candidates each year, which are then checked by specially trained people who must ensure that only the best workers are hired. As they acclimatize, newbies are often flattered, and at the same time feel surprised and annoyed by the amount of responsibility that is placed on them.

Some old-timers claim that they were protected from strong pressure by good bosses or relatively slow paced departments. But others tell how they blurred the line between life and work, and tried to impress a company that behaves like a tireless task director. Even those who worked on Wall Street or made their start-ups say that the work can be exhausting - the marathon duration of the conference at Easter or Thanksgiving, criticism from the authorities because they were not constantly on the Internet, and many hours spent at work at home in the evenings and on weekends.

“One time I didn’t sleep four days in a row,” says Dina Vaccari, who joined the company in 2008 and managed sales of gift cards to other companies. She once paid out of her money to an Indian freelancer to put more data into the database for her. “These business enterprises were like children to me, and I did everything in my power to bring them to success.”

She and the other employees had no shortage of career choices, but they said they had absorbed Amazon’s priorities. The groom of one of the former employees of the company was so worried about her processing that he came to her office at 10 pm and called her on the phone until she agreed to go home. When they went on vacation, she sat at Starbucks every day and continued to work via Wi-Fi.

“Then I earned an ulcer,” she says.

Amazon has a powerful pressure lever - the company has collected more data than any other retailer in history. The real-time stream of information allows the company to track all the gestures of users — what they add to the baskets, but not to buy when readers stop reading a purchased e-book in the Kindle, and their interests, correlated with previous purchases. The system reports when the pages are not loading fast enough, or when the supplier does not have enough goods in stock.

Employees are responsible for a huge number of metrics. All this is checked during business reviews, which are conducted weekly or monthly. A couple of days before the event, employees receive printouts, sometimes 50-60 pages. And at the meeting, an employee can call and ask for the value of any of the thousands of parameters specified there.

The answers “I am not sure” and “I will clarify and inform you later” are not accepted. Some managers begin to call the workers "stupid" or demand "to stop this nonsense." And the most difficult questions are asked about failures in work, when, for example, something is not delivered to customers on time.

Such meetings strongly interfere with the rest of the work, but at the same time they help to take all these metrics as part of the overall workflow and make their minds work with a lot of small details.

Workers feel that their work is never finished or not done well enough. One of the company's buildings is called “Day One,” a reminder from Bezos that this is only the beginning of a new era of commerce, and they still need to achieve much.

In 2010, Chris Buchia, who worked on the clothing site, received terrifying performance criticism from the boss - a half-hour lecture on what he had not achieved and what skills he had not developed. He already thought about how he would inform his wife that he was fired, but the boss finished the lecture with the words “Congratulations on promotion” and tried to hug Buchia, who was too shocked to respond to the hug.

Noel Barnes, who has been working in the marketing department for nine years, spoke about the saying in the company: "In Amazon, ideal workers come to feel like losers."


Company employees go to lunch

Constant competition

In 2013, Elizabeth Willett, who served as the captain of the US Army in Iraq, went to work as a manager for suppliers of household utensils, and was surprised how her work turned out to be energetic and close to doing business. After the birth of the child, she agreed that she would work from 7 am to 4:30 pm, then pick up the child and then often work further, already from home. And although the boss told her that everything was fine, her colleagues, who did not know what time she came in, complained to her boss, seeing that she was leaving too early.

And he told her that he could not protect her in front of her colleagues, who believed that she was not doing her job. She quit the company one year after work.

Criticism in the company goes through a special tool, the Anytime Feedback Tool, through which employees can complain or praise colleagues and management. While bosses see the authors of the messages, they are usually unknown to the one about whom these messages are written. Every employee has a rating, and every year workers with the worst rating are laid off, so everyone tries to outrun the rest.

And although, according to managers, most of the messages are positive, employees call them a river of intrigue and fraud. They talked about secret treaties in order to jointly sink an employee.

But the Amazon feud extends beyond the comments "behind the eyes." It is said that meritocracy serves as the ideal of Bezos, in which ideas of people fight for primacy, where colleagues must compete with each other, even if it is tiresome and unpleasant.

David Loftesnes, the main developer, said that he was impressed by the concentration on customer needs, but he could not bear the hard communication that took place at the meetings. For years, he and the team improved the capabilities of the site's search engine, and then discovered that Bezos had given the go-ahead to the secret development of competing technology. "I am not going to become a person who can work in such an environment," he concluded. He quit and went to work on Twitter as a chief engineer.

Each year, the culmination of competition within the company becomes the Organization Level Survey tournament, where managers argue about the ratings of subordinates, placing the names in a table on the wall. Recently, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have left this practice, because it often leads managers to get rid of talented and valuable employees only to fulfill the plan for dismissal.

This meeting begins with a discussion of lower-level staff whose achievements are discussed before a panel of senior managers. The hours pass, and gradually the managers leave the room, knowing that the people remaining in it will decide their fate.

Many say that the preparation for this event resembles the preparation for judicial protection. To avoid the loss of valuable team members, they must prepare iron evidence to defend the unfairly accused and blame the members of other groups. Or they exchange scapegoats to save more valuable members. “You learn how to politely throw people under the bus,” says the marketer, who has spent six years in the retail department. “This is a terrible feeling.”

Galbato, HR Director, explains the need for this event. "We hire a lot of great people, but not always we get it right."

Dick Finegan, employee retention consultant, warns about the consequences of mandatory layoffs. “Of course, if you can build a company that does not contain ballast, then build. But how to keep it afloat? You should have a queue around the office of very competent people who want to work for you. ”

Many women working in Amazon believe that such a rigid system exists in the company due to the complete absence (at the moment) of women in the manual - unlike Facebook, Google or Walmart. Several women who previously worked in the top management of the company say that some “leadership principles” prevented them from working. They could lose because of such vague criteria as “earning trust” (principle No. 10) or because of disagreements with colleagues.

Maternity also becomes a weakness. Michelle Williamson, 41, a mother of three children who built a restaurant supply business in Amazon, claims that her boss told her that raising children would interfere with her career because the company needed to work longer than it’s accepted. This boss said that Williamson competed with younger colleagues who had fewer family concerns, and recommended that she find less complex work in the company. As a result, both he and Williamson quit. Subsequently, he said that he usually worked 85 hours a week and almost did not go on vacation.

When “all at once” is not enough

Molly Jay from the Kindle team received high marks for many years, but when she had to take care of her father, who suffered from cancer, and stop working at night and on weekends, her position changed. She was not allowed to go to a less stressful job, and her boss said that she had become a “problem”. She went on unpaid leave and then resigned altogether. "When you can’t work 80 hours a week, they consider it a weakness."

The former HR director told me that she was told to send for training to increase the effectiveness of one woman who had just undergone a serious surgical operation, and another who had recently given birth to a dead child. “What company do we want to turn into?”, She then asked her superiors.

The second woman soon left the company. “I experienced the most terrible incident in my life,” she wrote, “just to constantly check my performance, making sure that I completely concentrate on my work.”

Several local lawyers said that they are often approached by employees from Amazon who complain of unfair treatment, including those who were thrown out for “insufficient returns in favor of the company”. But this, of course, is not a reason for action. “Injustice is not outlawed,” says Sarah Ames, another attorney. Without clear evidence of discrimination, it is difficult to win a lawsuit about a negative employee assessment.

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“Amazon is working on data,” says Pierce, who launched his software company in Seattle, which employs many former Amazonians. “Changes will occur only if collected data testifies in their favor — when the technologies of hiring, work and layoffs cease to have economic feasibility.”

And the first signs of stress are already appearing due to rapid growth. The company already employs people from the east coast, many employees are obliged to transfer all their contacts to company recruiters. In Seattle alone, 4,500 vacancies have already been opened, including vacancies of analysts for "hiring a large number of employees."

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