Ambulances Were Called to Amazon Warehouses 600 Times in Three Years
vice.com
vice.com
Culture in the distribution centers(now called fulfillment centres) was definitely one of no excuses performance.
I take responsibility for my role in how the culture evolved.
In the early days, we were hiring like crazy, trying to “average up” with every single early hire, while trying to keep the customer happy with orders backing up with exponential growth.
We worked nutty hours, often packing a bag to stay overnight or for a few days.
Hourly associates and temps were often compelled to work 50+ hours per week.
Terminations were very quick and cold as we didn’t feel we had the time to do it properly with customers orders clogging up.
Something had to give. So we were all pretty ruthless. Perform or leave.
I’m proud of what we achieved, but it came at a significant personal cost to many people.
I burned out after 3+ years.
I believe it’s a fair bit better now, but still a challenging environment that requires good performance or risk of termination.
It’s not a place to “coast” or “Be a grey man/woman”.
20 years ago we had scanners than could measure productivity.
Nowadays, everything is measured.
You can’t hide from your productivity data.
The real problem is that the variation of human performance is so large. Variation of performance between individuals can be addressed by firing the weak. But an individual’s performance from day-to-day and over the long term also varies greatly.
The incentives to raise performance standards to unsustainable levels is enormous. How could Amazon’s robots (and managers) resist the temptation?
For scale, Amazon had 566,000 employees at the end of 2017. With 200 trips per year, that’s about one trip per 2,800 employees.
For comparison, US ambulances made about 16.2 million trips in 2003 on a population of 290 million, or one trip per 17.9 people.
If we assume that employees spend 1/4 of their week at work, then while working at Amazon you are 39.5 times less likely to need an ambulance than an average American.
;)
There are way less warehouse workers in Amazon UK so your calculations are off.
Having worked in all the very early US distribution centers(pre automation and now called fulfillment centers) and privy to early UK, German, French, and Japanese distribution operations ambulance calls were less than common, but more than rare.
That was before Amazon hit a headcount of 16k(when I left).
I recall several ambulance calls.
Mostly legit, things like heat/humidity, ankles, pre-existing issues such as obesity/poor fitness, and the rare workers comp lotto attempt.
It was easy to sneak off to the bathroom in the smaller facilities.
The bigger facilities had dispersed bathrooms, but depending on the specific job role/location it could be quite a long walk back/forth to use it.
Most of a break period could be spent traveling to/from a break area.
I’m just guessing, but I suspect facility design for the many more recent fulfillment centers(100+ since the early ones) take into account employee traffic/movement/efficiency based on data from existing centers.
A few of my former peers and direct reports are now in quite senior roles in operations for the company.
They are genuinely good people, good managers, and good leaders.