A Staggering Number Of Amazon Employees Quit This Year. Here's Why
Amazon has seen enormous employee losses over the course of 2022. Engadget reports that employee attrition rates rose to as high as 150% this year, and this should be alarming for a number of reasons. For one thing, it means that Amazon has lost more employees than it started the year with. It also means that Amazon warehouses must hire an immense volume of new talent on a regular basis, even as the company seems completely unable to keep people in their positions. That's not even getting into Amazon's confirmed layoffs of an unknown number of people.
In truth, there are a number of factors that play a substantial role in this huge level of turnover. For one thing, attrition rates are something that all companies must deal with. However Amazon's volume of employees simply quitting has often been striking, according to Insider. Similarly, the company seems to show no sign of interest in promoting from within. This means that an employee looking to make a career by starting in the proverbial mailroom will likely need to look elsewhere.
Even as Amazon remains a staple of the U.S. and global commercial economies, it may not be a great place to work for someone looking to set down roots and develop a lasting employer relationship. How and why are Amazon employees quitting at such alarming rates?
Attrition is massive at Amazon under typical circumstances
Amazon is a gigantic organization. The brand, according to MacroTrends, acts as an employer to almost 2 million people globally. What's more, since 2018 the total ranks of Amazon employees have grown by more than 20% each year, with a remarkable 62% increase from 2019 to 2020 alone.
Much of the base-level work at Amazon involves moving goods from seller to warehouse, and then from warehouse to consumer. This results in fairly tedious work for most of the people employed by the company. Whether you're involved in boxing up goods or transporting them from distribution centers to customers' homes, the daily grind is one of repetition and often involves a considerable dose of boredom. The Sun reports that tedious and boring jobs often see employees leaving at a high volume. Therefore, it's only natural to expect a fairly substantial turnover figure at Amazon.
Indeed, Amazon loses employees at a rapid pace under normal circumstances. However, the overlap between surging hires going into 2020 and an uptick in employee attrition shows the unique challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. With people stuck at home for extended periods of time, reliance on delivery services and digital retail became increasingly crucial. Amazon has been a leader in the eCommerce space for decades and it's only natural that the brand would see much greater demand in lockdowns, resulting in a need to hire more employees and get products moving with increasing speed.
Productivity monitoring, monotony, and an incredible pace of burnout
Whether under normal circumstances or the high-stress environment that featured in pandemic-era hiring efforts, there is no denying that working in an Amazon warehouse involves tedium, monotony, and boredom. All of these features lead to eventual burnout for even the most resilient workers.
However, Amazon is also well known for intense scrutiny and productivity monitoring practices. The average Amazon picker (the warehouse workers who find items and sort them for distribution to customers) is expected to move roughly 4,000 goods throughout a shift (via Insider). Added to this expectation is an unflinching time clock. Underperforming can lead to reprimands or worse. The Verge notes that Amazon deploys algorithmic monitoring processes that result in the automated firing of hundreds of employees regularly.
The combination of a management team that consistently demands high performance and rapid movement across the entire duration of a shift and the monotonous nature of this type of job leads to large numbers of employees quitting in a hurry. Yahoo! News notes that there are many instances of employees leaving after just weeks or even days on the job as a result of these working conditions. Amazon is constantly hiring new warehouse staff, so it's likely that those looking for long-term employment have either already worked at Amazon and left or should steer clear entirely.
Corporate culture and barriers to mobility force workers to look elsewhere
Amazon's corporate culture also has problems, one of which is limited mobility. Dice reports that Amazon higher-ups have fostered a system in which internal promotion is complex and often nonexistent. Instead, the company tends to seek out external candidates when filling supervisory positions. Rather than rewarding hard-working and knowledgeable warehouse staff that have demonstrated quality performance already, Amazon looks beyond its own ranks regularly. This means that warehouse staffers go into the job knowing that their ability to move upward is limited.
Engadget reports that mobility concerns are the primary reason for managers quitting Amazon warehouses and the second-highest reason for other staff members who work the floor. This suggests that the business' corporate culture prioritizes college education and external experience above company loyalty and internal know-how. This can certainly be a frustrating realization for an employee looking to establish community ties and develop a long-running future with the company. LinkedIn notes that the average American today will hold roughly 10 jobs before turning 40. This is a marked difference from historical conventions of joining a company for the long haul.
This change in the way that individual employees factor into a brand's long-running goals has been ongoing for many years, but with attrition rates continuing at such a blistering rate within Amazon's ranks, it seems that the company has taken this reality to a whole new level.
Even within a rigid framework, Amazon suffers from enormous organizational bloat
Amazon is a business that also runs on efficient handling of customer information, digital subscriptions, Amazon Web Services (which powers much of the internet), and a massive logistics system. Efficiency is what makes Amazon the enormous success it has become since its humble days as an online bookseller.
Even with this rigid approach to brand efficiency and speed, Amazon suffers from widespread organizational bloat (via The Information). Engadget reports that training tools used to onboard new hires are often lacking in effectiveness and tend to revolve only around watching videos or reading prompts and then moving on to the next task. Organizational bloat is something that affects all businesses, but it's surprising just how much dead weight is involved in the internal processes of the Amazon business model.
Considering its outward productivity and efficiency as a retailer of just about everything that a customer might want, Amazon's internal processes remain highly lacking in effectiveness and agility. Organizational bloat also plays a role in the corporate culture that exists in an office or warehouse space. If employees feel that their time isn't valued or that the training is threadbare or inadequate, they may start to feel that the business itself does not see them as more than just a number. Unfortunately, it looks increasingly likely that this is all warehouse staff are to Amazon.