For the first time since the company's inception, Amazon has officially included its Leadership Principles in employee evaluations, signalling a fundamental shift in corporate worker performance evaluations.
The new three-tiered structure formalises the company's 16 key principles in quarterly evaluations, which determine everything from compensation raises to prospective performance improvement programmes.
Beginning with this quarter's mid-year review cycle, Amazon managers will evaluate employees based on three criteria: Leadership Principles adherence, performance, and potential. These criteria combine to provide an Overall Value score, which directly influences career advancement and remuneration decisions, The Times of India reports.
The project underscores Amazon Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Andy Jassy's continuous efforts to build a more disciplined staff and improve organisational culture. Over the last year, Jassy has adopted a full return-to-work mandate, cut management layers, and modified compensation models to better reward top performers.
The new evaluation process combines Leadership Principles adherence with "performance" and "potential" ratings to assign an Overall Value (OV) score to each business employee. This score directly affects wage raises and whether employees will be placed on performance improvement plans.
According to internal documents obtained by Business Insider, only 5 per cent of staff will receive the highest "role model" rating when assessing Leadership Principles behaviour. The company's spokesperson, Sam Stephenson, stated that these improvements "streamline the process for managers and help to ensure greater consistency."
Employees continue to criticise Amazon's performance evaluation approach, describing the system as "predatory and opaque." The corporation maintains its problematic stack-ranking system, in which managers assign employees to five performance tiers based on predefined percentages.
Teams with more than 50 employees must rank 20 per cent in the top tier, with 5 per cent categorised as "least effective." This quota system has been criticised for potentially causing managers to undervalue skilled personnel to achieve distribution obligations.
