Amazon Is Now Surveying Corporate Staffers About Job Satisfaction Every Single Day The internal system, called Amazon Connections, grew out of the company's notoriously grueling warehouses.
By Geoff Weiss
Opinions expressed by BIZ Experiences contributors are their own.
Amazon is taking a relentless approach to employee satisfaction in the wake of an explosive New York Times report that portrayed the e-tailer as rife with tears and dysfunctionally cutthroat.
Every single day, employees are now being posed questions about job satisfaction, leadership and training opportunities via an internal system called Amazon Connections, Bloomberg reports. The system was created for staffers in Amazon's warehouses last year, but then rolled out to its corporate offices this summer.
Feedback is evaluated by teams in Seattle and Prague, which synthesizes responses into daily reports. While the identities of respondents are available to the Amazon Connections team -- who may then call upon employees to discuss their responses in further detail -- the reports themselves contain only anonymous, aggregated data.
Back in August, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos said that the Times report didn't "describe the Amazon I know" in a rebuttal memo to employees that encouraged them to "escalate to HR" in the case of "any stories like those reported." But asking staffers to provide feedback on a daily basis seems to evoke the excessive rigor that the company is attempting to evade.
And at Amazon, similar tools have been manipulated for ill in the past. A former employee told the Times that the company's Anytime Feedback Tool, which allows employees to send feedback about colleagues to management, was used as a scheming mechanism by staffers, who either agreed to praise one another to get ahead or sabotage competing employees via collective criticism.
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