Employee Activism Is The New Normal. So Why Is Amazon Leadership Freaking Out?

Earlier this week, The Guardian reported that Amazon threatened to fire two activist employees if they continued “speaking up about Amazon’s role in the climate crisis without seeking approval.” One of the threatened employees, Maren Costa, responded by saying: “This is not the time to shoot the messengers. This is not the time to silence those who are speaking out.” 

Costa is correct — not only because of the gravity of climate change, but also because we have entered an age where employee messengers abound, and wherein leaders would be remiss to think that silencing their voices is a viable option. Last year, for example, global public relations firm Weber Shandwick found that 4 in 10 employees (38%) say they have “spoken up to support or criticize their employers’ actions over a controversial issue that affects society.” 

“[T]he majority of employees, particularly Millennials, believe that they are right to speak up for or against their employers when it comes to hot-button issues,” explained Weber Shandwick CEO Andy Polansky. In this passion-driven environment, leading companies such as Amazon cannot be intimidated by employees who stand up for the causes in which they believe. Instead, leaders should mindfully address the interests of employee activists — both before and after they enter the public sphere. Here are three ways to do so. 

Today’s workers place deep weight on their employer’s stated purpose and values; 76% of millennials, in fact, “consider a company’s social and environmental commitments when deciding where to work.” To reduce the likelihood of dissatisfied employees, therefore, a leader’s first step should be aligning their company’s behavior and values. “[I]f your actions are out of step with your proclaimed values,” communications expert Shel Holtz wrote, “it should come as no surprise that employees for whom purpose and values are increasingly important will have an issue.” Upon first witnessing a disconnect, Holtz said employees will feel betrayed; upon witnessing it repeatedly, they will take action, as in the case of Amazon. 

“It is easy to dismiss young employee activists as entitled new entrants to a tight labour market,” 

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson wrote in the Financial Times. “But it should have been clear to employers that their newer hires want to work for companies that share their values.” This certainly should have been clear to Google when it signed a contract with the Department of Defense to use the company’s AI technology in war drones.

Since “Project Maven” appeared to be antithetical to Google’s values — the company’s former motto of “Don’t be evil” was explicitly referenced in complaints — Googlers revolted. Some dozen employees even resigned. After a flurry of media attention, Google canceled the project and eventually released a set of principles regarding its work in AI, including the fact it would not use its technology for weaponry. Though their response was superior to Amazon’s, the tech giant’s leaders could have avoided the controversy entirely by ensuring their actions were in concert with the values they claimed to espouse. 

According to a survey from Povvado, a mere 35% of employees feel their CEO has “his or her finger on the pulse of employee attitudes towards important societal issues.” While that might seem inconsequential, Povvado found this perception actually has a significant impact on how employees view their companies. Among those who felt their CEO understood employee attitudes, for example, 96% agreed with the statement “my company lives its values.” Among those who felt the opposite way, that number plummeted to 53%. That matters because, as shown above, activism is sparked when companies fail to abide by their values.

Thus Povvado’s founder William Stewart told CEO Magazine that leaders should “seek out and listen to the opinions and attitudes of arguably their most critical stakeholders — employees — to gauge how business decisions may impact employees and the external world.” Harkening back to the example of Project Maven, Stewart surmised that Google may have avoided outrage by polling employee attitudes through focus groups and other initiatives. 

At Business 2 Community, Elizabeth Williams agreed. “Too many organizations ignore the dissonant in favour of the dissident,” she wrote. “Those Eeyore employees who are going around complaining about stuff are easy to focus on and easy to help find the door. The problem is, when you send them packing or silence them, they just make their noises elsewhere.” Rather than ignoring or punishing those employees, Williams recommended viewing them as valuable “detectors of values dissonance,” and urged leaders to seek their feedback before they cross the threshold into public employee activism. 

While it is tempting to dismiss employee activists as spotlight seekers, Weber Shandwick’s research revealed that only 11% of activists want media attention. Far more want the attention of fellow employees (46%) and the organization’s leadership (43%). It is vital, therefore, for leaders to pay attention to their demands. “Corporate reputation can find itself on shaky ground if no one is taking the employee pulse or feedback seriously,” explained Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist at Weber Shandwick. 

Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible to quantify the effectiveness of leadership listening to employee activists at an early stage, because, in the most effective scenarios, the demands never make it to the public eye. What is measurable, however, is the number of organizations that failed to listen — and thus wound up in the press as the subject of criticism from their own employees. In the past year, that tally includes Wayfair, Amazon, Google, Adidas, Facebook, and Microsoft, to name a few. 

Even Salesforce, a company long lauded for its progressive practices, experienced a wave of employee activism when hundreds of employees asked the company to stop selling software to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency. In response, CEO Marc Benioff created an internal “Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology” to review such issues. “I might be called an ‘activist CEO,’ because I’m responding to what my employees want,” Benioff said at the Fortune CEO Initiative 2019. “But the reality is that if you don’t do that, you are not going to be the CEO. We have a lot of examples in Silicon Valley, where CEOs were ‘fired’ by their employees because they did not listen.”

Although Jeff Bezos is probably not in danger of being “fired” by Amazon’s staff, he would do well to take a page from Benioff’s book. Rather than threatening his most passionate employees with the loss of their jobs, he should consider listening more closely to their concerns. As Weber Shandwick’s Gaines-Ross told the Boston Globe, “We are in the era of the employee activist” — and leaders need to start paying attention. 

Source: Forbes.com

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