In April, Amazon unveiled its “Pay to Quit” program, an idea it snagged from its subsidiary Zappos. Once a year, fulfillment center employees are offered a no-strings-attached payment to quit. After the first full year of employment, they are given $2,000 if they leave; the offer increases by $1,000 each year after that, up to a maximum of $5,000.
Why is Amazon paying its employees to scram? The idea is that unhappy employees are unsuccessful employees, and the cash will act as an incentive for those low performers to leave. The employees who really, really want to work at Amazon will resist the tempting offer and stay.
The program forces employees to pause once a year and consider how committed they are to the company. "We hope they don't take the offer. We want them to stay," explained CEO Jeff Bezos in his latest annual letter to shareholders. "The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want. In the long run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company."
Zappos’s program, which they announced in 2008, is called “The Offer”—and Zappos also hopes it is one that their employees can refuse. It’s extended to all Zappos employees, not just fulfillment workers. Such is Zappos’s confidence in the scheme that it has gradually increased the payment from $100 to $2,000, or a full month’s salary. On its website, Zappos claims that “Less than 2 percent of all prospective employees end up accepting the offer.” (Although the word “prospective” leaves us wondering what the percentage is of actual employees who take the company up on the offer.)
Amazon’s program is still too young to prove its ROI. It will take time (maybe years) to evaluate whether the program actually helps the company shed its disengaged staff and move forward with those who are truly committed to their work. A trickier feat will be to isolate the program’s impact, if any, on the company’s bottom line. In the meantime, however, both Zappos and Amazon are undoubtedly collecting data around which employees are (and are not) accepting the offer, and why. The programs present a new metric for engagement levels at the two organizations, providing rich insights into what makes their employees happy and successful.
