Amazon wants to know how much its employees hate working for it

The New York Times released an in-depth report a couple of months about how much it sucks to work at Amazon, and with how much attention the report got, the company has been forced to do some serious damage control in the weeks that followed. Fortunately, the company is also making an effort to actually improve its work environments by doing things like asking its employees what the do and don’t like about working at Amazon. It’s doing this through Amazon Connections, a tool that the company released last year, which allows it to gather feedback from its employees, but was initially limited. Following the report, however, Amazon has expanded Connections significantly.  

Amazon.com Inc. wants to know how its white-collar workers are feeling. Over the past few months, the online retailer has been ramping up efforts to get regular feedback from corporate staffers about their work environments. The effort is being expanded two months after a scathing newspaper report portrayed the online retailer as a pressure cooker where worker hardships are ignored and back-stabbing is encouraged. Dubbed Amazon Connections, the internal system poses questions daily to employees to collect responses on topics such as job satisfaction, leadership and training opportunities, people with knowledge of the initiative said. The company started the program at its fulfillment centers staffed mostly with blue-collar workers last year and has been rolling it out to other departments since then, first hitting the corporate ranks this summer. The confidential feedback is assessed by a team in Seattle and Prague that compiles the answers in daily reports shared with the company, said one of the people, who asked not be identified discussing internal company communications. Some employees will be encouraged to speak in further detail with members of the Connections team. Individual employee responses aren’t anonymous, but are shared only with members of the Connections team and the reports will contain only aggregated data.