If you work for Amazon, Jeff Bezos will pay you a bonus of up to $5,000. Generous, right? And what do you have to do to get the bonus?
Quit your job.
It may seem crazy, but it's true - a recent article in Time notes:
Called Pay To Quit, the program is “pretty simple,” Bezos says. “Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it’s for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000.
The program began at now-Amazon-owned Zappos, and Bezos adopted it when he saw how well it worked there. And what does 'working well' mean in the context of this policy: people quitting? people not quitting?
"Working well" means, quite simply, that the people who quit are those who value a quick $5,000 more than they value working at Amazon. If you think about it from that perspective, I suspect it's a very cost-effective way to get unhappy, unproductive employees out of the organization. It's a kind of instant litmus test for job satisfaction and commitment. While $5,000 may seem like a lot of money, I've seen countless instances of not-quite-bad-enough-to-fire employees costing 10 times or 100 times that much in terms of lost sales, disaffected customers, manufacturing mistakes and missed innovation opportunities.
This policy reinforces for me something I already believed; that Amazon has a strong, positive, vibrant company culture. Many things about this policy demonstrate to me what I see as the human and business power of such a culture.
• In strong cultures, leaders consider crazy ideas: I love the fact that, when Amazon bought Zappos, they didn't suppress this seemingly goofy idea in their newly acquired company, but rather adopted it themselves in an even more radical form. In great company cultures, leaders don't need to prove they're always right - they have the freedom to try new ideas they haven't thought of themselves.
• In strong cultures, leaders trust the power of what they've created: I'm convinced Jeff Bezos and his senior team have the confidence to offer this "pay to quit" bonus because they believe that their company is such a good thing that it will attract good people more than the promise of a quick one-time cash infusion.
• In strong cultures, employees are actually loyal and committed: The fact that this policy has been in place for a number of years proposes to me that not many people are taking the money. In other words, most Amazon employees would, indeed,rather continue to work at Amazon.
• In strong cultures, employees see the bigger picture - and how it connects to them: For someone to decide to continue working at a job rather than take a hefty payout (for some junior employees, this could be a couple of months' worth of paychecks), it means that they see the organization as able to provide them something else that's more valuable. In the Time article, Bezos is quoted as saying, “The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want.”
Every week, someone from our team at Proteus writes an email that goes to everyone else in the company - we take turns, and everyone ends up writing a couple of emails a year. In the last email, one of our employees told everyone why he feels proud to work at Proteus: because the work we do helps our clients; because his capabilities are valued and encouraged; because he sees how his work helps the company succeed. As I read about Amazon's policy, I realized that I'm confident if we offered the "pay to quit" bonus to our employees, no one would take it. And if I'm wrong, and one of them would...well, I guess being willing to find that out and seeing it as a benefit is the whole point.
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