Can asking employees to fill out a daily survey improve workplace culture?
Amazon seems to think so. According to reporting by Bloomberg, the e-retail giant is posing questions to employees about things like job satisfaction and leadership and training opportunities.
The initiative is being being sent through a system called Amazon Connections, and though it has been around for a while for blue collar workers at Amazon’s fulfillment centers, the efforts have been ramped up and rolled out to corporate employees since the scathing New York Timesexpose about the company’s culture made major waves this August.
As part of the initiative, employees will send confidential responses to a team in Seattle, who will then aggregate them and share a daily report with company leadership, reports Bloomberg. Employees may also be asked to speak about their responses with the Connections team.
While the effectiveness of the initiative has yet to be proven, anything seems better than how the Times describes Amazon’s current feedback system, in which employees are asked to send secret feedback to one another’s superiors. One of the company’s sample texts? “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”
Ironic that “openly complaining” is exactly what the company is now asking its employees to do.
