I toured an Amazon FBA fulfillment center in Massachusetts in 2019, part of the company’s PR efforts to portray Amazon as a great place to work. Here are the Amazon work metrics they noted: higher-than-average pay and the benefits that start on day 1, including education and health care.
But there were also signs that employees were evaluated mostly on Amazon work metrics gathered from the sensors and scanners built into the warehouse. I’m talking literal signs … “Your XYZ score is calculated on PDQ rates every n hours” as well as Bezosian dogma about customer obsession (“Pay attention to competitors, obsess over customers”). Hard physical labor is also required in some parts of the Amazon fulfillment center, such as unloading trucks and handling oversized packages.
Is it any wonder that the company is having trouble finding new workers? And is a meaningful culture shift to address these issues even possible, considering the people running the company are mostly Amazon lifers and Bezos is still chairman?