Ex-Amazon managers say they were pressured to cut successful workers to meet attrition goals — and faced retribution when they resisted

• Former Amazon managers say they were pressured to cut successful workers to meet attrition goals.
• When they resisted doing so, they faced retribution, according to Insider's reporting.
• An Amazon spokesperson said the anecdotes don't reflect reality for most of the company's workers.

Amazon's annual performance reviews were approaching, and a programmer team lead was prepared.

He had landed at Amazon after a series of jobs running teams at other high-profile tech employers. In anticipation of Amazon's performance-review period, he told Insider, he'd kept careful notes on what his employees were doing well and where they could improve.

So when one of the programmer team lead's superiors told him that an employee on his team would be given a rating of "least effective" and placed on a formal coaching plan, he pushed back.

This programmer team lead, a former Amazon employee who was granted anonymity because his severance agreement prohibited him from speaking with the media, told Insider this team member was a high performer and "arbitrarily selected" for the coaching plan. He said this was a typical way for Amazon to meet its attrition goals — essentially pretending that certain employees weren't meeting expectations so they could be dismissed for poor performance.

"I shared their progress; I shared their accomplishments and their feedback from their peers," he said of the conversations he had with his managers about this employee. "This doesn't happen very often, but I was able to convince them that they weren't in that category."

Later that month, the programmer team lead said, he received a coaching plan, which Insider has reviewed, from his skip-level manager saying that he was underperforming in certain areas and would need instruction on how to improve. His skip-level manager — the term Amazon uses to refer to the supervisor of an employee's supervisor — told him what he already suspected: He was now in Amazon's formal coaching program.

After none of his work seemed sufficient to get him out of the program, called Focus, the skip-level manager told him that he was about to enter an official performance-improvement plan. It would behoove him, the skip-level manager said during a phone call, to let Amazon's human-resources department know that he would accept severance and leave the company.

He took the advice.

"Within an hour, my network was turned off," he said. The following day, "I had to pack up my laptop," he added.

It can be tough for Amazon employees to get out of coaching programs and performance-improvement plans

Amazon sets a goal each year for the portion of employees that managers aren't sad to see leave the company — whether voluntarily or otherwise, Insider's Eugene Kim reported. This is known as its unregretted attrition rate.

One strategy Amazon often uses to meet its attrition goal is letting employees go after documenting that they have failed to meet expectations and placing them in Focus, according to people who spoke with Insider for this story and Insider's previous reporting. These people said leadership would place employees in Focus even if the managers of those employees said that the workers had met or exceeded expectations.

Three former managers, two of whom left Amazon within the past few months, told Insider that senior leadership had been pressuring managers to place some employees in Focus even when those workers had a record of high achievement at the company.

Insider also spoke or corresponded with five other current and former Amazon workers who said either they had been placed in Focus after performing well or were pressured by senior leadership to put a high-performing employee in Focus. At least one former manager said they were placed in Focus after resisting putting an employee on the coaching plan, even though they ultimately agreed to do so.

Once employees move from Focus to Pivot, what Amazon calls its performance-improvement plan, it's often difficult for them to get out, Insider previously reported. Often, employees who have been placed in Pivot end up leaving the company with severance.

This practice can put Amazon's middle managers in a difficult position: They can follow guidance from upper management and tell employees who are doing well that they're not meeting expectations — or they can eschew these edicts and risk their own job security.

In a statement sent to Insider, an Amazon spokesperson said: "A handful of anonymous anecdotes is not an accurate representation of reality for the vast majority of our colleagues, and many of these details are false. Most companies have performance expectations, and no company wants high performers to leave. At Amazon, the vast majority of our team meets or exceeds our bar and we of course want them to stay. If someone is struggling to meet expectations, they're offered coaching and opportunities to improve."

Amazon managers are telling high performers that they're missing expectations

In January, Insider published an as-told-to essay from the perspective of an Amazon marketing manager who said they had been told by their boss they were missing expectations and needed coaching in certain areas, shortly after being told they were on track for a promotion. This marketing manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize their employment, said they feared losing their job.

In the days that followed, Insider received upward of 20 messages from people who said they worked for or had worked for Amazon and that something similar had happened to them. After Insider published a second as-told-to essay, from the perspective of a former Amazon manager who said he was placed in Focus shortly after he resisted placing some of his employees in Focus, nearly 70 additional messages came in within a week.

Some of these people said they'd been blindsided when their managers put them on a coaching plan shortly after praising their performance. More than 20 said they'd been pressured into putting a valuable employee on a coaching plan without justification and were subsequently rated as a low performer and/or managed out when they pushed back.

One person wrote that their coworkers "actually thought it was me" when they read the January as-told-to essay on Insider. In response to the second as-told-to essay on Insider, someone wrote, "My highest performer was deemed least effective while my ineffective social butterfly was a high performer. Defending that put me in the LE bucket." Insider verified that these people were current or former Amazon employees.

Amazon managers have limited ability to get their employees out of performance-improvement plans

Managers are prohibited from telling employees when they're in Focus, though they can confirm that an employee is in Focus if that person asks. They also typically have limited influence over whether an employee can exit Focus or Pivot.

A former Amazon engineer, who spoke on condition of anonymity so as not to jeopardize his career, said he was placed in Focus about a year after his manager encouraged him to go for a promotion. The former engineer said he followed up with his manager about the promotion multiple times during that year and his manager said he wasn't ready.

When that manager moved to a different position within Amazon, this person said he got assigned a new manager who sent records of his achievements to an independent panel of reviewers. Members of that panel have a role in deciding whether an employee can be removed from Focus. When the panel let the former engineer's new manager know that the former engineer had to remain in Focus and still needed improvement, the new manager told him that he didn't have the power to override the panel's decisions.

The former engineer said he started shirking his job responsibilities in an attempt to get let go with severance but eventually resigned and did not receive a payout from Amazon.

Some ex-Amazon managers say they were pushed out after defending employees against unfair performance ratings

A former software-development manager described an experience similar to that of the former programmer team lead.

The former software-development manager, who was granted anonymity because the severance agreement he signed prohibited him from speaking with the media, told Insider he learned he was in Focus the same month that he pushed back against placing two employees on his team in Focus.

Before annual performance reviews last year, the former software-development manager said, his manager forwarded him an email — which Insider has reviewed — from his skip-level manager. In the email, his skip-level manager said the team needed "additional URA" and urged one of the recipients of the email to identify candidates for Focus. An Amazon HR representative appeared to be copied on the email.

The former software-development manager said that he resisted when his manager suggested placing two of his direct reports, who had joined Amazon within the prior quarter, in Focus. He said he remembered his manager discussing in a video meeting the need to fulfill quotas for the Focus program and telling him, "We believe in mechanisms, not in good intentions."

Later that month, the former software-development manager said, he received an email from his manager outlining the areas in which he was falling short of expectations. A few weeks later, he said, his manager told him he was on Pivot and had the option to leave the company with severance, which he did.

A former Amazon manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their career, said that to be eligible for a promotion, they had to prove they could manage people out of the company. 

The former manager, who was a software-engineering leader at Amazon and left the company more than a year ago, said his boss would regularly ask him at one-on-one meetings: "Do you have any low performers?" Sometimes, the former software-engineering leader said, he would tell his boss that he did and was working with those employees to improve their performance. But, he said, "generally the messaging was, 'Let's manage them out. Let's get somebody else in.'"

Senior leaders would lower the performance scores employees received from their bosses, some former managers said

The former programmer team lead said that senior leaders often changed the performance ratings he gave employees on his team. Amazon managers are required to submit their performance ratings for employees in an online tool, then discuss their rationale with managers above them, he said.

When he would reopen the tool to see the final ratings for his employees, "There was a pretty good chance that where I thought they should be on the performance scale was going to be changed," he said. Senior leaders would "bump down" employees who didn't belong in the "least effective" category, he said, in order to meet company quotas. 

Insider reported in November that Amazon leadership was telling managers to start stack ranking their employees. Employers that stack rank their employees typically compare them to each other in an effort to identify and push out the lowest-ranked workers.

The former programmer team lead said that once he saw the final performance ratings, he would then have to speak with employees about their scores. "As a manager, you're expected to back up the company," he added, and to provide examples of how the employee had missed expectations if they'd been placed in the "least effective" category. "I refused to do that," he said. While he started the coaching process with this employee, he continued providing senior leadership with evidence of the employee's high performance until he was able to dissuade senior leadership from putting the employee in Focus.

This is not every manager's experience at Amazon.

When a former Amazon worker wrote on Medium that he left the company because he worried constantly about being placed on a performance-improvement plan, Oren Nachman, the head of software development for Amazon Web Services operations management products, demurred.

Nachman wrote on Twitter that "the biggest myth about Amazon" was that "5%-10% of the department/organization will always have to be under a performance improvement plan," adding: "I have been a manager at Amazon for 5.5 years across different orgs, under different VPs and I have never, ever been seen this."

Employers rarely disclose when they distribute performance ratings evenly across the workforce

Many employers have annual attrition targets. In the past few months, Insider has reported that Microsoft and Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram, are more actively targeting underperforming employees for dismissal in an effort to cull their ranks and cut costs.

It is "reasonably common" for companies to increase the number of dismissals for performance in economic downturns, said Peter Cappelli, the director of the Center for Human Resources at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

In January, Amazon said it would lay off roughly 18,000 corporate employees, joining other tech employers conducting mass layoffs amid concerns about a recession and following a period of rapid hiring in recent years. But layoffs raise an employer's unemployment-insurance costs, Cappelli said, "so it is cheaper, in that sense, to fire people."

In Cappelli's experience, employers rarely say explicitly that they're increasing the rate of dismissals for performance. Employers also tend to cloak that they've decided in advance how they're going to distribute performance ratings, Kim Scott, a CEO coach who has worked with leaders at Apple, Google, and Twitter, said.

"That's what is truly unfair," Scott said. "It is a manager's job to have these conversations with their team so that people aren't surprised at the last minute."

It's generally difficult to sue an employer for evaluating and dismissing an employee unfairly, Cappelli said. In most workplaces, "the employer is in charge of what your performance is supposed to be, what the standards are, and how well you have met those standards," he added.

During his time at Amazon, the former programmer team lead said, he asked HR and other managers to explain the rationale behind unregretted attrition. He said no one gave him a clear answer.

"We hire these people because they're high performers, and they're really good at what they do, and they have a lot of potential," he said. "Sometimes they get thrown into this arbitrary bucket and that's it. You can't really do anything with them at that point."

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