The New York Times got people talking over the weekend with a long piece on the corporate culture of Seattle-based Amazon, which recently surpassed Wal-Mart as the nation’s top retailer.

The piece — which declares it talked to more than 100 former employees as well as current senior managers, but not top brass, including CEO Jeff Bezos — simultaneously described the work environment as “bruising” and as “purposeful Darwinism” but also as “innovative” and on the global cutting-edge. One point the story made that seemed to touch a nerve with many was that former employees reported being forced out after suffering personal illnesses and tragedies, such as cancer and miscarriages.

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

Not long after the piece was published, Bezos issued an internal memo to employees, saying: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day,” and encouraging employees to bring issues that concern them to human resources.

In fact, the Times’ piece might be revealing a larger truth about work in the 21st century: “Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.”

“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change, told the Times.

Read more: The New York Times, Re/code

Brief Take: As the global marketplace becomes ever more competitive, so does the workplace. It’s up to employees to decide if they want to participate in that culture, including the financial upside.

Tags:


  Save as PDF