Here Chris Clare and his dog Crosby greet receptionist Andrea Kraus on Amazon‘s pet-friendly campus in Seattle.
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Over the weekend, the New York Times published “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace”, an article by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld exposing a dark jungle within the massive online retailer.
Amazon, which employs more than 7,000 staff work at Amazon’s giant UK distribution centres in Swansea, Hemel Hempstead, Milton Keynes, Peterborough, Rugeley near Stafford, Doncaster, Dunfermline and Gourock in Inverclyde, did not wish to comment on the criticism.
“But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR”. One woman has actually taken him up at his offer.
Technology firms on the US west coast have a reputation in the public eye of being employee-friendly, unlike the dog-eat-dog world of investment banking.
Others joined me in expressing some skepticism at the NYT reporting and interviews that relied primarily on former employees.
Wall Streeters have been quitting their jobs in Manhattan for the more progressive tech workplaces. JPMorgan and Citibank followed suit with similar policies.
But, in a perhaps telling divide between those who work in tech and those outside of it, Silicon Valley seemed a bit underwhelmed by it all.
If the Times’ description of how the company allegedly treats its sick and pregnant white-collar workers is making you mad, remember that in 2011, Amazon paid ambulances to wait outside a sweltering Pennsylvania warehouse to treat workers who collapsed from the heat.
The enduring picture from the story was that of Amazon staffers routinely breaking down in tears at their desks.
Rarely has one company’s corporate culture come under such sustained scrutiny as Amazon’s did this past week.
Challenger adds that there are positives and negatives to competitive cultures. Generally, those who are the most productive, and these people tend to work the most hours. “They can be extremely successful or burn out”. Some have described Amazon as a place with a “huge potential for advancement” where people can work with really smart colleagues and state of the art technology. “But that may partly be because the article was driven less by irrefutable proof than by generalization and anecdote”. Some “Amazonians” backed up the article’s description of a brutal, unrelenting workplace. That’s home to the Googleplex, a campus known for both its lavish perks (like free meals and on-premises masseuses) and its creation of a culture that fosters creativity and individuality.
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz blogged that Amazon wasn’t the only company “burning out their employees with unsustainable expectations”. Amazon seems to have created a work environment that leads to backstabbing, grandstanding, and inevitable conflicts between workers fighting to prove they shouldn’t be fired in the company’s annual culling. Amazon has responded publicly and forcibly to correct these incidents, and many contend that this behavior was in the past. The Times was accused of taking an ideological, one-sided slant.
Cynics even questioned the motivations of the Times, given that Bezos owns its competitor The Washington Post.
Markus Giesler, an associate professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University, said Canadian companies are just as susceptible to the extremes of corporate culture as American ones.
Amazon head of infrastructure development Nick Ciubotariu took to LinkedIn to chronicle how the Times story was “so blatantly incorrect”.
Like me, Perner is a regular Amazon customer.
The first bad PR that struck Amazon stateside was an investigation by a local Pennsylvania paper inside one of the fulfillment centers that discovered even more horrifying abuse. It has a decentralised business model, with its e-commerce and cloud businesses largely operating independently of each other.
But the lure of a job at Amazon is not just to get ahead. “We’re so happy for fast fashion for example, if it means we have trendy and cheap stuff to wear, that we don’t stop to ask what’s behind-the-scenes – like who these people are and what the working conditions are”.
But when the company matures and growth slows, the big personalities can clash because there are fewer opportunities for promotion.
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“We let them off the hook for god knows what – everything including breach of privacy, they are the wave of the future and we don’t know much about that”, says Winegard.
