Some companies take pride in keeping their employees. For Amazon, the question is rather to retain them. According to internal company documents, revealed by the Engadget site, the turnover is particularly impressive: around two-thirds of the new employees hired in 2021 did not stay more than 90 days within the group. The media does not specify if this information refers to all the markets where Amazon is present, or only to the United States.
According to Engadget, an employee is even twice as likely to leave the company on their own than to be fired, especially in the United States, where employee protection is much lower than in France. And this observation applies to all levels of the company, for all statuses (from the order picker to the CEO), although the documents do not indicate precise figures.
For the company, this is necessarily a problem: This catastrophic attrition rate (retirements, voluntary departures, layoffs, etc.) costs Amazon $8 billion a year, which will come down to $33.36 billion. in group earnings in 2021.
Beyond this financial mismanagement, another internal study, revealed last summer by the Recode site, highlighted the intense turnover in American warehouses that could end up exhausting all the available labor in certain metropolises within a few years.
Opacity
But this situation goes far beyond the warehouses. In the New York TimesDavid Niekerk, a former vice president of human resources at Amazon, was updating internal policies to prioritize hiring young graduates over internal promotion. Thus, among new managers, only 4% are promoted workers compared to 39% of young graduates without experience.
Amazon has also been singled out for the opacity of its performance management program, “Focus,” which actually tracks employee activity. According to Business Insider, the latter are not warned about their poor performance and are directly invited to leave the company in exchange for compensation.
Source: BFM TV
