Amazon.com an Orwellian employer running an internal police state

(NaturalNews) No one said getting to the top of your industry was easy, but for employees of online retail giant Amazon.com, just getting through a work day can be tough sledding.

That’s because from Day One, new hires are given their marching orders: Forget your “poor habits” from the past; you’re at Amazon now, and here, we have a new way of thinking.

As reported by The New York Times, new recruits to Amazon settle in for orientation every Monday morning at the company’s Seattle headquarters in order to get their minds right, so to speak – to get them into the company’s singular way of working.

When they hit away from the unforgivably fast-paced work environment, they are told there is just one solution: “Climb the wall,” say insiders, as reported by the Times. To be the best employees possible, they should follow these leadership principles – that is, 14 rules that have been inscribed on laminated cards. Days later, when new hires are quizzed about those rules, anyone earning a perfect score is given a virtual award that proclaims, “I’m Peculiar” – Amazon’s proud phrase for dismissing conventional workplace mores and norms.

Some come, some go, but all are pressed to go beyond

And by a number of measures, there is nothing normal about working for Amazon. As the Times reports:

At Amazon, 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 internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

Ouch. Life at the world’s most valuable retailer can certainly be rough.

In fact, as the Times notes, a lot of newcomers might not even be there in a few years. Winners are those who come up with new innovations that are then offered to a customer base of about 250 million people; they receive accolades, pay raises and small fortunes in stock.

Losers, however, either leave or are fired in annual staff cullings – or, as one former Amazon human resources director said ruefully, “purposeful Darwinism.” Some who have suffered from medical issues like cancer or miscarriages and other personal crises have later said they were unfairly evaluated and forced out instead of given time to recover.

But what is clear, say insiders and others who spoke to the Times, is that even as the company examines product delivery via drones and push-button toilet paper restocking (seriously) it is also waging an experiment on how far its white-collar workers can be pushed, even to the point of redrawing what boundaries are considered acceptable.

‘People cried at their desks’

The company, which was founded and is still being run by Jeff Bezos, has tossed aside a number of popular management prescriptions that other companies at least pay lip service to, instead designing what several workers called a sophisticated machine that drives them to achieve Bezos’ always-expanding ambitions.

“This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter, told the Times. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”

For a lot of people, apparently.

Bo Olson is a former book marketer for Amazon, a guy who lasted less than two years at the company. He told the Times that his most vivid memory of working at the company is of fellow workers crying after meetings and at their desks.

“You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”

See the entire report here. And see Bezos’ response to the scathing article here.

Sources:

http://www.nytimes.com

http://www.amazon.jobs

http://www.geekwire.com