Amazon.com (Photo : Reuters)
Online retailer Amazon was the subject of a recent controversy that exposed the company's severe culture within its workspace. Amazon's brutal workplace culture was described as a jungle.
According to New York Times, new Amazon employees are told to forget whatever "poor habits" they have managed to acquire in their previous jobs. Amazon employees are also forced to follow a 14-rule leadership principle to which the company claims should be their strict guide. After days upon acquiring the leadership principles, employees are quizzed and those who manage to get a perfect score are rewarded with a virtual token proclaiming, "I'm Peculiar."
Amazon employees are also encouraged to compete with one another with an extreme level of competency that forces some of them to sabotage each other's ideas. Some employees are also forced to work for extended hours while some claim that emails sometime arrive after midnight and they will be reprimanded if they were not able to answer immediately.
Amazon also has an internal phone directory that instructs employees to send secret and often career destructive feedbacks to their fellow employee. Report claims that a sample employee feedback template reads, "I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks."
Despite these surprising work ethics being promoted inside Amazon, some employees claim that this form of strict code of conduct have forced them to reach a point of thrilling power to create. Some Amazon employees also said that their creativity thrive within the company because they were pushed past what they thought was the end of their limitation.
As a response to the recent criticism, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos told BBC, "The people we hire here are the best of the best. You are recruited every day by other world-class companies, and you can work anywhere you want."
