[charlesju]

Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers? How do you judge manager performance, solely by morale?

[throw_m239339]

> Honest question, if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers?

define poor performers.

I've work for abusive corporations that were setting impossible goals and called employees "poor performers" and fired them when these impossible goals were not met.

[rufus_foreman]

If the goals are impossible and they fire people who don't meet them, who does the work?

[bluedino]

Employees who produce less than others. Say John packs 50% as many orders as Jim. Should he be fired?

[JumpCrisscross]

> if you were running Amazon, how do you protect against bad actors or poor performers? Do you leave it solely to the discretion of the managers?

You take the explicit metric and make it unsaid. Over the course of a few months, if a worker isn't meeting their "goal", they're given a generic performance warning. If they don't improve, they're terminated.

This is why workers need a way to push back on quotas.

[core-utility]

So instead of the workers knowing the metric out in the open, you hide it from them and secretly judge them on it?

[kelnos]

Quotas are fine, as long as they are reasonable, and workers don't need to skip food and bathroom breaks in order to make them.

The problem seems to be that Amazon has ahead of time decided the level of "productivity" they want, as well as the amount of money they want to spend on labor, instead of actually measuring bad/average/good productivity on its own, and then setting quotas (and expectations of labor cost) based on that.

[notJim]

Is having quotas itself a problem, or is it that the quotas are too demanding and rigid? From what I've read, it's very hard for most people to meet them, and injuries are common. Turnover is also very high. Quotas do have the benefit of being objective, which is good for workers too. It's harder for a manager to fire someone for discriminatory reasons if they're meeting an objective criteria, for example.

It seems like instead you could make the quotas challenging, but not to an extent that they're impossible for most people to meet without injuring themselves. You could also have some (but not infinite) flexibility to allow for bathroom and lunch breaks.

[throwaway14356]

good question!

At 200 per hour each customer paid 18 seconds in salary. At 15 usd/h that is 7.5 cent.

You could double the salary and half the load and pay 30 cents per customer.

i wouldnt care. on 50 usd average order its nothing