David Ryder/Getty Images
- A former HR staffer at Amazon put employees on a performance-improvement plan known as Pivot.
- Then the HR staffer, who said they developed PTSD from the work, was put on their own PIP.
- An Amazon spokesperson said the account contains inaccuracies about the company's process.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with a former Amazon HR worker who was put into the company's performance-management program known as Pivot. This person spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid jeopardizing their career. Business Insider has verified their identity and employment at the company. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
I worked at Amazon in HR for several years. Not only did I administer Pivots, but it was eventually brought to my attention that I was going to be going through one.
They made a mistake by doing that with me. There wasn't a lot of information to justify a poor performance.
The Pivot goal was a straight, across-the-board 6% number. And as an HR person, that is a hefty figure.
And it was driven hard by the HR VPs to show the metrics — daily, weekly — to make sure we knew who was in the pipeline. Not to improve, but who's in the pipeline to get out. There wasn't a lot of interest in improving people.
You might be cutting some prime choice with the fat. And they were OK with that. They wanted that number. The managers who had to implement it and tell their people they were on Pivot — I would say a majority of them hated it. Because, one, they didn't have the skills to be able to manage performance that soon out of the gate. A lot of our managers were brand new.
The first thing you had to do is work with a Pivot consultant. So that was somebody in HR, besides the manager's business partner. And you'd talk about if it's the right time, if it's the wrong time to Pivot someone.
I would say 80% of my time ended up focusing one way or another on Pivot. Either the Pivot appeal or the Pivot work that workers' managers had to do. And look, I'm not going to say you're going to ever find this somewhere, locked down in words. But the idea is, if you're putting somebody in Pivot, you make that so damn hard that they don't get out.
Almost always, unless there was some really unique set of situations where it came out during the appeal, the success rate of that was virtually none.
When I wasn't working on Pivots, working in HR was great. We were supposed to be doing coaching and focusing on strengths and focusing on moving people through the organization in a positive way.
Later, when Pivot came back, we had stack rank all of our employees. The way we broke it down, we called it top tier which was, you know, maybe 15-20% by the time it worked out. And then you had the middle. And then you have the bottom tier. The bottom tier was about 20-25%, maybe even up to 30%. The guideline that they expressed publicly may be different because we always worked to make sure we have more than that because some went bad — or went off the rails and we couldn't exit them for whatever reason.
We were way over how many people were actually underperforming or detrimental to the business. Maybe around 1%, 1.5 to 2% were actually not performing well.
I have PTSD
I was disgusted at what I was seeing with the Pivot process. This process alone has given me PTSD. It impacted me so much as a person that I had to get out of there.
When it was justified, it was easier to push someone out. If it's deserved, there's no problem. But when it wasn't deserved, you had people crying and begging and they couldn't understand.
You had visa-sponsored employees that once we Pivoted them and moved them out, they no longer were authorized to work in the United States. So they had to make immediate plans to get out of the country. And it's a long process to get sponsored by another group.
In the years I was there, I never ever ever had any performance issue given to me — not even anything close to being serious. I had no worries because I asked for feedback all the time. I'm like, "What can I do? How can I do better?" I didn't ever want to be blindsided by Pivot myself. And what a lot of people did — if they got the indication that they were going down that track — is they would transfer jobs right away. Some people were successful. A lot of people weren't.
Normally with a performance-improvement program, as an HR person, you're following progressive discipline. Are you seeing notes that this person is having trouble? Are you seeing coaching conversations that are taking place? So for it to actually just — boom — be there is really problematic.
It was my turn
During my performance evaluation, when it was clear I was on a PIP, my manager shared criticisms that I'd never heard before. I said, "I've never had any of these comments come to me ever." Essentially it was a lot of made-up stuff. I mean, you could put some truth to it. I'd been late on a few assignments. But everybody's got some element of things they can improve on in their work. My manager just chose to bring those out.
Amazon broke down people into three categories. You were either top tier, middle of the pack, or at least effective.
Normally they won't tell you what they rate you and I'm like, "Come on. I know this stuff just as much as you do. I know the wording. You didn't put me in the medium category. Would you just admit that you put me in the least-effective category?" And I got my manager to admit that.
I wasn't put on Pivot. My manager wanted to work with me a little bit to see if I was going to commit to the job. So they sat me down and said I could go on Pivot and leave right away or they would work with me. Well, obviously not having any job opportunities, I said, "Look, I'm in it. Let's try to get better and go from there." So my manager took away all my direct reports, and shoved me into a small box and said you could do this and try to work yourself out of it.
Right after that, I started putting the full push to get another job. And so I started interviewing. I actually had a headhunter that reached out to me. Originally, I told her no, but then some of this stuff happened. And I'm like, "OK, let's revisit it." I got to the point where they offered me a job and I was going to quit. But I had a huge stock investment coming up. So there was no way I was going to rock the boat in any way, shape, or form just trying to get to this date.
If you walked away during the Pivot or anytime before you had your investment before it was there for you, you would lose it all. And I'm not talking a little bit of money. I'm talking I had a couple hundred thousand dollars coming to me.
I played along and I'm good at playing along when I have to be. So then the money is in my account. That next day, I called my manager and I told them I was resigning. They blew a gasket — absolutely blew a gasket because I had told them that I was in it for the long run. I said, "Look, you gave me no choice. You put this threat against me. I'm not just gonna sit there and wait for it to be dependent on you. You get to make the call whether I make it or not." My manager was super mad and asked me when I was leaving. I said two weeks. They were incredulous that I wasn't giving them more respect.
The biggest thing — and I'm gonna say this goes for many, many people that were put on Pivot — is there were no warning signs. There was no trail of communication saying, "You are underperforming." I mean, even if it's something as simple as, "Hey, can you do better on this next time?" I know, certainly, I got zero negative feedback. I got the feedback that I was rocking it. And then all of a sudden to be in this place it's like, "Huh."
I still wonder about what happened to all the people that went through that process. How did it impact their life? I think it leads to a lot of mental-health issues.
Margaret Callahan, an Amazon spokesperson, told BI via email: "Like most companies, we have a performance management process that helps our managers identify who on their teams are performing well and who may need more support. For the small number of employees who are underperforming, we use performance management programs to help them improve, and many employees do just that. Sometimes the programs result in employees leaving the company. Business Insider declined to share the information needed to verify this individual's account, but it contains a number of inaccuracies about our performance management process. An unverified, anonymous anecdote in a Business Insider 'As told to' essay does not represent the experience of the vast majority of our employees."
Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your workplace? Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at thegrind@businessinsider.com with your story or to ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers. Or check out Business Insider's source guide for tips on sharing information securely.