Behind the scenes of Amazon: Fighting for big ideas in an unsafe work environment

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

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

To become the best Amazon players, they need to follow the 14 principles of leadership that are printed on convenient laminated cards. Those who in a few days will correctly answer the questions of the questionnaire will receive the virtual award "I am special" - a proud phrase denoting the overthrow of working traditions.


Amazon builds new offices in Seattle - in three years they will be able to accommodate 50,000 employees

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to criticize other people's ideas at meetings, work late (emails arrive after midnight, and then they receive SMS asking why you didn’t answer emails), and adhere to standards that company bosses boast about, “ unreasonably high. ” The company's telephone directory has instructions on how to secretly send reviews to bosses of other employees. Workers claim that this system is often used to sabotage. The instructions include examples, in particular: "I am concerned about his lack of flexibility and the fact that he openly complains about minor assignments."

Many newcomers coming on Monday may quit after a few years. Lucky employees come up with the innovations offered to users and earn fortunes on take-off stocks. Losers leave, or get fired for annual staff thinning - “intentional Darwinism,” said one of Amazon's former HR directors. Some employees who suffer from cancer, miscarriages, and other personal problems say they have been unfairly assessed or removed from work, rather than giving time to recover.

While the company is testing delivery by drones and ways to update toilet paper supplies at the touch of a button in the bathroom, an invisible experiment is being conducted to test the maximum workload of office workers, which changes the permissible limits. The company, which he founded and is still managed by Jeff Bezos, rejects commonplace methods of management, which at least are subject to discussion in other companies. Instead, a system works, which 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 it's not easy,” says Susan Harker, the company's chief recruiter. - When you aim high, the work becomes difficult. And some people can’t do it. ”

Bo Olson is one of those. He lasted less than two years in the book advertising department, and says that he tolerated the look of people crying in the office - and others told about this. “You get out of the meeting room and see how an adult covers his face,” he says. “I saw almost everyone with whom I worked, crying in the workplace.”

Thanks to its ability to squeeze everything out of employees, Amazon’s position is stronger than ever. Its swelling campus is becoming a 10 million square foot bet that thousands of new employees can sell to anyone, anything, anywhere. Last month, the company eclipsed Walmart, becoming the most expensive retailer in the country, with a capitalization of $ 250 billion, and Forbes declared Bezos the fifth in the list of the richest people on Earth.

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

However, more than 100 current and past Amazons, team leaders, HR directors, marketers, sales people, and engineers working on projects ranging from Kindle to food delivery, described how they tried to make friends in sometimes extremely difficult conditions. working with what they call an “exciting opportunity to create.”

Some admitted in an interview that they succeeded in the company because it pushed them beyond their capabilities. Many are motivated by “dreaming more and knowing that we barely plunged into the abyss of possible inventions,” says Elizabeth Rommel, director of retail, who was allowed to give interviews.

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

“Many people in the company feel the tension. It's the best work I've ever hated, ”said John Rossman, a former director who published Amazon's Way.

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

“Organizations are raising the bar, forcing teams to work harder for less, to cope with their competitors, or just keep moving forward,” says Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-age businesses turn into more modern, responsive change.

That morning, when fresh employees were waiting for the introductory presentation to begin, few of them fully understood which experiment they were in. Only Kate Ketzl, a freckled athlete with an MBA, enthusiastically told how he left the old and awkward company in a faster and more daring. “Conflict brings innovation,” he says.


Picnic for employees

Working philosophy

Jeff Bezos turned to data-based management quite early on.

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

After a few decades, he created a technology and retail giant that works 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 has overturned the usual work style of Wall Street, using algorithms to get the most out of every transaction.

Early workers and directors say that Bezos, almost from the very foundation of the company in 1994, was determined to deal with what, in his opinion, was ruining business - bureaucracy, wastefulness, and insufficient accuracy. As the company grew, he wanted to code his ideas about how it should work in instructions, some of which would be counterintuitive. Moreover, they should have been simple enough for beginners to understand, common enough for all areas of the business that he wanted to enter, and accurate enough to weed out the mediocrity that he was so afraid of.

The result is “leadership principles” that describe how the company should operate. In contrast to those firms whose philosophies are vague enough, Amazon has rules written in the company’s language and rituals. They are used for hire, 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 do not allow them to achieve this. Workers must demonstrate affiliation (rule No. 2), or mastery of all aspects of their business, and “dig deep” (No. 12), that is, find hidden ideas that will help fix problems or come up with services before customers even ask about them.

The workplace should be transparent and accurately reflect who is achieving results and who is not. At Amazon, ideal workers are described as athletes with great stamina, speed (No. 8 “aptitude for action”), efficiency that can be measured and the ability to challenge restrictions (No. 7 “dream about more”).

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

Rossman says that Bezos told 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 opportunity to bring their dog, mostly young men, their own farmers' market and joyful posters - the company is considered to be something separate from this. Google and Facebook motivate employees with gyms, dinners and benefits like bonuses to young parents. As Google says, “we care about you all.”

Amazon does not pretend that feeding employees is their priority. Compensation has to be fought. Successful mid-level managers can receive dividends in the amount of a whole salary from shares that have grown almost 10 times since 2008. But workers must be “thrifty" (No. 9), from desktops to telephones and travel expenses, which they often pay for themselves. No free buffets and snacks. All are focused on the constant pursuit of customer satisfaction, or “customer obsession” (No. 1).

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

What is most distinguished is his belief that the achievement of harmony in the workplace is overestimated - they say that it 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 their colleagues, giving out such reviews that can even be painful for the authors of ideas.

“We strive to get the right answer,” says Tony Galbato, HR Vice President. “Of course, it would be much easier to compromise and not argue, but this can lead to a wrong decision.”

And at its best moments, Amazon represents Bezos's revitalized idea - a place where ideas are put to the test. Workers say their colleagues are the most stubborn and strict of all that they had. Even new employees can contribute a lot. For example, a simple engineer Daniel Bachmüller took part in a project for delivering goods by drones.

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

“The client was able to buy an Elsa doll (Frozen), which they could not find in New York stores, and get it at home in 23 minutes,” Landry says.

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

Motivating Amabotov

Old-timers of the company say that her genius is that she forces them to force themselves. “Good Amazons become Amabots,” one employee said, bearing in mind that employees are merging with the system into a single whole.

Amazon's warehouses are monitored by a sophisticated electronic system that verifies that they are packing enough orders per hour. Amazon caused a scandal in 2011, when workers in a warehouse in eastern Pennsylvania worked in more than 37-degree heat, and outside there was a line of ambulances that picked up employees who had fainted from a heatstroke. Only after the local newspaper conducted a journalistic investigation, the company decided to install air conditioners.

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

The process begins when the army of recruiters selects thousands of candidates annually, who are then checked by specially trained people who should ensure that only the best employees are hired. As they acclimatize, newcomers are often flattered, and at the same time they feel surprise and annoyance with the volume of responsibility that they put on them.

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

“Once I didn’t sleep for four days in a row,” said Dina Vaccari, who joined the company in 2008 and was in charge of selling gift cards to other companies. She once paid out of her money to an Indian freelancer to enter more data into her database for her. “These business enterprises were like children to me, and I did everything in my power to lead them to success.”

She and 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 daily and continued to work through Wi-Fi.

“Then I earned the ulcer,” she says.

Amazon has a powerful lever of pressure - the company has collected more data than any other retailer in history. The real-time information flow allows the company to track all the movements of users - what they add to the baskets, but do not buy when readers stop reading the purchased e-book in the Kindle, and their interests, which are related to previous purchases. The system reports when pages do not load 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 each. And at an employee meeting, they can call and ask the meaning of any of the thousands of parameters indicated there.

The answers “I’m not sure” and “I will clarify and inform later” are not accepted. Some managers begin to call employees "dumbasses" or demand "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 greatly interfere with the rest of the work, but at the same time they help to accept all these metrics as part of the overall workflow and make their minds work with many small details.

Workers feel that their work is never finished or 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 a lot.

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

Noel Barnes, who has worked in the marketing department for nine years, spoke of a proverb that goes to the company: "Ideal employees come to Amazon to feel like losers."


Company employees go for lunch

Constant competition

In 2013, Elizabeth Willett, who served as captain of the U.S. Army in Iraq, entered the position of manager for suppliers of household utensils, and was surprised how her work was energetic and close to entrepreneurial activity. After the birth of the baby, she agreed that she would work from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., then pick up the baby 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 was coming, complained to her boss, seeing that she was leaving too soon.

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 a year after work.

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

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

But the feud at Amazon extends beyond the eyes. They say that the ideal of Bezos is a meritocracy, in which people's ideas fight for primacy, where colleagues must compete with each other, even if it is tiring and unpleasant.

David Loftesnes, the main developer, said that he was impressed by the focus on customer needs, but he could not stand the hard communication that took place at the meetings. For years, he and the team improved the site’s search engine capabilities, and then discovered that Bezos gave the green light to the secret development of competing technology. “I'm not going to become such a person who can work in such an environment,” he concluded. He quit and went to work on Twitter as chief engineer.

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

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

Many say that preparing for this event resembles preparing for judicial protection. To avoid the loss of valuable team members, they must prepare iron evidence to protect the unjustly accused and blame members of other groups. Or they swap scapegoats to preserve more valuable members. “You learn how to politely throw people under a bus,” says a marketer who spent six years in the retail department. “It's a terrible feeling.”

Galbato, HR Director, explains the need for this event. “We hire a lot of great people, but we don’t always do it right.”

Dick Finegan, a retention consultant, warns of 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 line around the office of very competent people who want to work for you. ”

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

Motherhood also becomes a weakness. Michelle Williamson, 41, a mother of three who built a restaurant supply business at Amazon, claims her boss told her that raising children would interfere with her career because she needed to work longer than usual. This boss revealed that Williamson competed with younger colleagues who had fewer family concerns and recommended her finding a less difficult job in the company. As a result, both he and Williamson quit. Subsequently, he said that he usually worked 85 hours a week and hardly went 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 was suffering from cancer, and stop working at night and on weekends, her situation changed. She was not allowed to switch to less stressful work, and her boss said that she had become a “problem”. She went on unpaid leave and then quit completely. “When you cannot work 80 hours a week, they consider it a weakness.”

The former HR director said that she was ordered to send one woman who had just had a major surgery to another to increase her effectiveness, and another who had recently given birth to a dead child. “What company do we want to become?” She asked her superiors then.

The second woman soon left the company. “I experienced the most terrible incident in my life,” she wrote, “only to ensure that my effectiveness is constantly checked, making sure that I completely concentrate on work.”

Several local lawyers said they were often approached by Amazon employees complaining of unfair treatment, including those who were thrown out for "insufficient returns to the company." But this, of course, is not the basis for the lawsuit. “Injustice is not illegal,” says Sarah Ames, another lawyer. Without clear evidence of discrimination, it is difficult to win a lawsuit over a negative assessment of employees.

Jason Merkoski, 42, an engineer, worked on the first Kindle reader, and explored how people use technology to understand how to improve it. He left Amazon in 2010 and returned shortly in 2014.

“Just a huge amount of innovation necessarily leads to the fact that something goes wrong. You need to fix things, then explain why they didn't work. Help you heaven if you receive an email from Jeff. It feels like the director of the company is at home at night and breathes in the back of your head. ”

Leaving band

Amazon retains employees by requiring them to pay part of the bonus they received when they got a job if they quit less than a year later. Employees are also required to pay part of the money they received to move if they quit within two years. Many companies try to keep employees by paying them benefits - Netflix has the opportunity to go on maternity leave for a year and get paid at that time. Amazon has no paid maternity leave at all.

During the interview, it turned out that the 40-year-old employees were confident that the company would replace them with 30-year-olds who could work more, and 30-year-olds, in turn, were afraid that they would be replaced by 20-year-olds who could work even more. Max Shipley, the father of two children, who left there in the spring, wonders if companies can start hiring students who have no household chores and spouses and who can work longer. At the same time, Max is 25 years old.

Amazon claims their reputation as a strict morale company is wrong. According to PayScale's 2013 reports, the median tenure for a company employee was just a year — one of the lowest rates for a Fortune 500 company. Amazon claims that this is due to a tight selection of staff that only 15% of employees remain in the company for more than five years, and the turnover is quite inherent in the technology company.

Employees, along with HR managers, note a constant outcome. “You can clearly see the pattern by which people quickly burn out and leave the company,” says Nimrod Hoofien, director of development at Facebook and an old-timer at Amazon.

But this consequence is not a failure of the system, but the logic of its work is the constant hiring of newcomers who help spin up the Amazon machine faster and then burn out and leave only the most stubborn Amazon players.

“Amazon doesn't mind filtering a lot of people to catch superstars from it,” says Vijay Ravindran, who has been with the company for seven years. The last two years - manager of technology for placing orders. “The stars remain in the company because of great opportunities and great salaries. It's like washing gold. ”

At the same time, employees leaving the company are in great demand in the job market due to the work ethic that they have absorbed. Many companies, such as Facebook, have opened large offices in Seattle, and they benefit from this flow of people. But some companies, on the contrary, are wary of hiring former Amazons because of their fighting habits. They are called "Amasrans" and pugnacious workaholics.

Call it whatever you like, but their number is growing. Amazon is completing the construction of a 37-story office and is starting to build another such tower. Moreover, it is already planned to build a third and a place for two more. After 3 years, the company will have enough office space for 50,000 employees - three times more than it had in 2013.

And they will try to make Amazon the first retail company with a capitalization of a trillion dollars. They expect all people to watch movies from Amazon, play Amazon games on Amazon tablets, and say to Amazon's communicators that they need Amazon firewood delivery and new garden chairs, and a few more Amazon potato chips, please.

Jeff Bezos was able to come up with not only the future of e-commerce before everyone else, but also a suitable working atmosphere - lively but tough, where employees do not work long, but give all the best.

“Amazon works on data,” says Pierce, who has launched his software company in Seattle, which has many former Amazon workers. “Changes will only happen if the collected data testifies in their favor - when the technologies of hiring, work and layoffs cease to have economic justification.”

And the first signs of tension are already appearing due to rapid growth. The company already hires people from the east coast, many employees are obliged to transfer all their contacts to company recruiters. There are already 4,500 job openings in Seattle alone, including “hiring large numbers of analysts.”

Some companies, faced with such requests for the number of employees, would moderate their ambitions or revise their working methods. But not Amazon. In a recent recruiting ad, the girl warns: “You will either fit into the situation or not. You will love her or not. There will be no intermediate options. ”