Recently, Amazon made headlines for its unorthodox approach to tackling a challenge every company faces. It’s the question haunting senior management and human resources professionals everywhere: How do you find out which employees are bringing your company down and what can you do to stop them?
Amazon’s answer: pay them to quit.
The e-commerce giant offered employees manning its fulfillment centers a financial incentive to clear out their workspaces and clock out for good. The baseline offer began at $2,000 for first-year employees and increased by $1,000 for each additional year an employee spent at the company, topping off at $5,000. Amazon plans on extending this offer on an annual basis.
Before you write off Amazon’s Pay to Quit initiative as a crass stunt or radical experiment, take a moment to view it through the lens of your own professional situation.
If you enjoy your company’s culture and your day-to-day job, I would be willing to bet you are probably a productive employee who turns out high-quality work and makes meaningful contributions to your company. It’s likely you feel loyal to your employer for reasons that go beyond a paycheck. You are bound by a sense of purpose, and no nominal, short-term financial reward could convince you to abandon that purpose.
On the other hand, if you dislike your company culture and feel like every day is a slog filled with work you don’t enjoy, I would wager a guess that you are prone to underperforming. Perhaps you don’t get as much done as you could, or the quality of your work doesn’t approach your full potential. Maybe your negative attitude affects other more engaged employees—either way, your income is probably the main reason you continue to show up. But, what if you had some cash to cover you while you pursued greener pastures? The folks at Amazon would rather not play the “what if” game. They know the long-term cost of an unhappy employee pales in comparison to the cash they are willing to forgo up front in order to cull the disengaged detractors from the pack. Recent studies prove it.
Gallup found that companies with 9.3 engaged employees for every one disengaged employee experienced a 147% higher average earnings per share than their competitors. To the same ends, employers with 2.6 engaged workers for every one disengaged employee had an average earning per share 2% lower than their competitors.
Considering those statistics, the Pay to Quit policy is a pretty effective way to systematically cultivate a workforce of employees who are emotionally connected to their company beyond a paycheck. However, a lot of organizations don’t have the luxury of dangling financial incentives in front of unhappy employees—and maybe yours is one of them. Don’t worry, it doesn’t mean you are stuck shouldering the disengagement burden without recourse. Instead, you can take steps to proactively keep satisfied employees engaged, and reverse the downward spiral of dissatisfied employees who pose a threat to your company culture and bottom line.
The first step toward increasing engagement is collecting feedback from your employees to find out how they are feeling. Use surveys to determine their current satisfaction levels, motivations, and what is holding them back from being productive and engaged staff members. These insights will help you take actions to improve your overall company culture and retain better employees. This is critical because happy employees lead to a healthy bottom line. They treat customers better, produce better products and services, and save companies from having to spend money replacing them.
Bill Taylor, co-founder of Fast Company, wrote a column for Harvard Business Review about Amazon’s policy, stating, “In a sense, Pay to Quit is an annual performance review of the company by its employees: Can I imagine not working in this department, with these people, for this company?"
By actually collecting feedback and allowing employees to give your company a “performance review,” you don’t have lure them toward the door with money. You can analyze their insights, take action to make improvements, and ensure they feel trading in a superior workplace culture for cash is simply unimaginable.
For a step-by-step guide on how to implement an employee feedback program at your company, download our complimentary playbook Retain or Drain: The A.R.T of Engaging Employees.