This article, about work culture at Amazon, set off a lively online debate that reminded me of my suspicion that such an innocuous-sounding, work-world bromide as "employee engagement" is actually just a euphemism for persuading employees to turn over to their employer ever larger chunks of their lives. We are all like Tom Sawyer's friends, suckered into thinking we'd like nothing better than to whitewash his fence.
One of the more measured comments from a former Amazonian was posted by Dan Kreft, who worked for the company for 15 years and was regarded highly enough so that a pair of his size-21 sneakers--Kreft played Division I college basketball at Northwestern--was given out as one of those dopey little prizes employees can win for, in this case, "just doing it." Kreft:
Amazon is a great place to learn from fantastically skilled and intelligent people. It’s a terrific place to work on systems on a scale that most companies can’t even fathom. It’s a thrilling place to work if you thrive on pressure and love being a part of something huge and powerful.
It’s a great place to work if you don’t have any interests outside of work and if you’re a corporate-ladder-climber type. But corporate culture doesn’t really promote treating its employees like human beings who have feelings and a life outside of work. At Amazon, you’re just a login...a face on a badge...“head count”...a row in a database in a giant air-conditioned room filled with servers, just waiting to have your bit flipped. So go ahead, Work Hard, Have Fun, Make History...but defenestrate any silly notions that you matter as a person.
I wish Jeff Bezos and Company continued success, but I wonder how much more successful they could be if they would only show the same kind of obsessive care about their employees as they do about their customers.
How badly are the employees treated? If you're reading this, you can read the Times's article, but, for me, the most alarming detail was this:
The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another's bosses.
In other words, the company solicits people to "squeal" on one another. Employees say it is used for purposes of career sabotage and cut-throat personal advancement. It's as if some of the worst traits of cruelly clever young teenagers had been elevated to the status of a respected new management strategy. Everyone at Amazon is on edge. People who have left say that it's common to see adults weeping at their work-stations. Kreft is right to wonder whether the company might be even more profitable if it treated its employees better. Since the company would have to change if no one wanted to work there, a related question would be why there isn't a debilitating exodus. Some people, evidently, put up with it. Why?
Probably more than one reason. Kreft points out that Amazon is great for a certain type of person that he describes. I don't know how many people fit the bill, and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't want to work somewhere in which there was only one kind of person--the ambitious, scheming, climbing, company man. A more sobering possibility is that what Amazon workers are experiencing is pervasive, so that they don't have options. I know, from my own corner of the work world, that a lot of extremely able people, having graduated from elite law schools, sign on with high-powered firms and discover that they detest it. The work culture they describe is distinctly Amazonian. The same goes for, say, investment banking. It seems to me that the American version of "brain drain" is not that our best and brightest emigrate but that they waste their talents working on the trivial problems of the rich.
Guy goes to a lawyer, says he wants justice for himself. Lawyer asks him how much justice he can afford. Some people can afford a lot--they litigate till the other side runs out of funds, appeal until they win. That's in the civil courts. In criminal courts, the rich and guilty are treated better than the poor and innocent. The people working in this rotten system are on the whole highly educated, intelligent, well-paid professionals. In the upper regions of the economy, you have a bunch of affluent people working on each others' problems, and hating it. In the middle and lower parts, you have people working like mad to keep from going under, and wishing they could be like the affluent people who hate their jobs, too. It seems everyone is miserable.
Maybe it's wrong to suggest that things are now particularly bad. People have always complained about the "rat race" while participating eagerly in it. In the middle of the 19th century, Henry David Thoreau asked, in Walden, why we should be so desperate to succeed--"and in such desperate enterprises!" He went on to postulate that "the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." It sounds as if Amazonians would concur if they had time to read anything but their work emails, which occupy them into the wee hours of weekday nights.
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