According to leaked documents, Amazon’s attrition costs $8 billion annually. And it gets worse.
The documents also indicate potential lapses in the company’s learning and development data.
Amazon churns through workers at an astonishing rate, well above industry averages, according to a tranche of documents marked “Amazon Confidential” provided to Engadget and not previously reported on, that staggering attrition now has an associated cost. “[Worldwide] Consumer Field Operations is experiencing high levels of attrition (regretted and unregretted) across all levels, totaling an estimated $8 billion annually for Amazon and its shareholders,” one of the documents, authored earlier this year, states. For a sense of scale, the company’s net profit for its 2021 fiscal year was $33.36 billion.
The documents, which include several internal research papers, slide decks, and spreadsheets, paint a bleak picture of Amazon’s ability to retain employees and how the current strategy may financially harm the organization. They also broadly condemn Amazon for not adequately using or tracking data to train and promote employees, an ironic shortcoming for a company with a reputation for obsessively harvesting consumer information. These documents were provided to Engadget by a source who believes these gaps in accounting represent a lack of internal controls.
“Regretted attrition” – that is, workers choosing to leave the company – “occurs twice as often as unregretted attrition” – people being laid off or fired – “across all levels and businesses,” according to this research. The paper, published in January of 2022, states that the prior year’s data “indicates regretted attrition [represents] a low of 69.5% to a high of 81.3% across all levels (Tier 1 through Level 10 employees), suggesting a distinct retention issue.” By way of explanation, Tier 1 would include entry-level roles like the company’s thousands of warehouse associates, while a vice president would be positioned at Level 10. It also notes that “only one out of three new hires in 2021” stay with the company for 90 or more days.
An investigation from the New York Times found that, among hourly employees, Amazon’s turnover was approximately 150 percent annually. In contrast, work from the Wall Street Journal and National Employment Law Project found turnover of around 100 percent in warehouses — double the industry average. The rate at which Amazon has burned through the American working-age populace led to another piece of internal research, obtained this summer by Recode, which cautioned that the company might “deplete the available labor supply in the US” in certain metro regions within a few years.
The assertions in this new document align with prior reporting but illustrate that problems with Amazon’s workplace and culture extend well above the warehouse floor. Managers of every stripe, too, are butting up against feeling their roles are a dead end. “The primary reason exempt leaders are resigning is due to career development and promotions,” one of the papers states while indicating those same issues represent the second-highest reason for quitting among the non-exempt workforce.
According to leaked documents, the original article is “Exclusive: Amazon’s attrition costs $8 billion annually. And it gets worse.”