Editor's note: This story was originally published on April 6, 2021. On July 5, Andy Jassy officially became Amazon's CEO, succeeding Jeff Bezos, who steps into the position of executive chairman. The headline has been updated to reflect the news.
Amazon has a complex performance-review system that some employees say is rooted in a cutthroat "stack-ranking" culture, Insider previously reported.
One of the key pieces of Amazon's review process is a metric called "unregretted attrition rate," or URA, which represents the percentage of employees that managers aren't sad to see leave the company — whether they part ways voluntarily or otherwise.
Even the most senior executives at Amazon, including incoming CEO Andy Jassy, closely track URA, according to internal documents obtained by Insider. Jassy, for example, has a "6% goal" for URA, which means he's expected to replace 6% of his team through "unregretted" departures on what appears to be an annual basis. That can include employees who left of their own volition and those who were fired for low performance.
The directive includes executives and managers, though it's not clear at what level a leader at Amazon might receive a URA target. Several sources said some leaders may have a URA goal even higher than Jassy's 6%.
In an email to Insider, Amazon's spokesperson said the URA targets cited in this article were "not accurate and are misleading" but did not go into specifics.
The internal documents showed that Jassy and other top executives also kept track of the "current unregretted rate," a running tally of the percentage of employees the company is not concerned about losing, and "current gap to goal," the number of employees it needs to see leave to reach its target URA. It also followed the number of people on an "active development list," as well as the conversion rate of people on coaching plans to URA.
One person familiar with the system said that tracking URA helped managers refresh their workforce by bringing new employees to the team and cycling those out who weren't successful at Amazon.
Others were more skeptical about its use. When there are fewer people who leave Amazon under URA than the target, some managers will have no choice but to force out the lowest-performing employees on their team, these people said — even if those employees are generally performing well overall.
It's a particularly intimidating factor for Amazon employees because they are ranked on a curve under a five-scale rating system, Insider previously reported. Those in the lowest-performing grade could fall victim to URA if their managers needed to reach their goals.
Conversely, the documents showed that Amazon executives followed a metric called "regretted attrition rate," which represents the percentage of employees the company was not happy about losing. That number is broken down by tenure, job level, and region, as well as "termination reasons."
"Like most companies, we track departures to ensure we are identifying patterns and understanding what they mean," Amazon's spokesperson told Insider about regretted attrition rates.
Do you work at Amazon? Contact reporter Eugene Kim via encrypted messaging apps Signal/Telegram (+1-415-926 -2066) or email (ekim@bjinnox.com).
Are you an Amazon Web Services employee? Contact reporter Ashley Stewart via encrypted messaging app Signal (+1-425-344-8242) or email (astewart@bjinnox.com).
