How well does this employee exemplify our company values? Our cultural DNA?
That’s essentially what Amazon and its CEO Andy Jassy is requiring its corporate managers to start factoring in to employee performance evaluations beginning this quarter, Business Insider reported on Wednesday.
The move codifies and formalizes what was previously implied: that Amazon managers should evaluate employees in part on how well their actions live up to the company’s 16 Leadership Principles—corporate totems or values like “Bias for Action,” “Customer Obsession, and “Frugality” that are supposed to guide behavior, decision-making, and new-idea development inside the tech behemoth.
“By making Leadership Principles a formal input…the updated process helps us strengthen the connection between performance and culture,” the new internal guidelines read in part, according to the report.
The formalization of this new evaluation is not surprising if you’ve tracked Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s leadership of the company in recent years. But it is significant; it’s the latest salvo in his yearslong crusade to strengthen, and in some corners of the organization, resuscitate, the company DNA architected by founder and previous CEO Jeff Bezos. What Jassy is seeking to do doesn’t have many examples to model after: transform the 1.5-million person company into the “world’s largest startup,” as he’s said is his goal.
But he and his leadership team have been consistently and meticulously taking action that they believe gives them a fighting chance to do so. In Jassy’s annual letter to shareholders published this spring, for example, the Bezos successor said his company strives “to operate like the world’s largest startup” and then laid out some of the details on getting there, including using what’s essentially an internal bureaucracy hotline to identify and, in turn, cut red tape.
Last year, the CEO also released an hour-long video tutorial on the meaning of each of the company’s 16 LPs, and how they should be interpreted. In the fall, Jassy and his deputies ordered corporate staff back to the office five days a week, believing new employees can’t learn or live the company’s principles if they’re not observing and practicing them daily.
Jassy also mandated that company leaders squeeze out layers of middle management and increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers by 15%.
“If we do this work well,” Jassy wrote at the time, “it will increase our teammates’ ability to move fast, clarify, and invigorate their sense of ownership, drive decision-making closer to the front lines where it most impacts customers (and the business), decrease bureaucracy, and strengthen our organizations’ ability to make customers’ lives better and easier every day.”
Despite the uphill climb facing Jassy and team, they feel they have good reason to try to turn back the clock. As Coins2Day documented in a deep investigation last year, the remote-work boom incited by the pandemic, coupled with Amazon’s rapid hiring and employee growth over the past decade, greatly impacted the company’s culture and how it operates. With it, the famed leadership principles began to show signs of fraying.
While formally evaluating how well employees exhibit the leadership principles will surely create its own challenges due to the subjective nature of the task, Jassy’s recent track record says it won’t be his company’s last attempt to fortify Amazon’s culture.
Are you a current or former Amazon employee with thoughts on this topic or a tip to share? Contact Jason Del Rey at [email protected] , [email protected] , or through messaging apps Signal and WhatsApp at 917-655-4267 . You can also contact him on LinkedIn or at @delrey on X, @jdelrey on Threads, and on Bluesky.
