Pivot is a joke

I stumbled on this as I’m trying to find other Amazon employees who were done dirty much the way I was. I’ll explain my back story before I get into what happened to show me the toxic and “guilty until proven innocent” mentality of the Amazon Pivot program and why it stacks the deck heavily against an employee. I was a CS rep my entire time of 13 years with Woot, 10 of which were with Amazon.

I started working for Woot.com in 2007. This was before Amazon bought the company in July 2010. When I started there, the culture was one of people working together, largely harmoniously, with more emphasis on being a snarky and unusual approach to internet retail. It was a fun culture where managers backed their employees when it came to decision-making and encouraged us to grow our skillsets in multiple areas by being cross-trained in different departments. Overall, we enjoyed work because we didn’t have the pressure of constant rigid constraints by Amazon’s money-making policies. Now, don’t get me wrong, Amazon like any company should make money and it be important to their bottom line. But the atmosphere before Amazon took over was one in which we challenged ourselves to grow but not with them being annual goals or things like that.

Anyway, in July 2010, when Amazon purchased the company, I knew they would turn it into a huge money-making endeavor and there’s nothing wrong with that. Instead of being focused on a good deal daily for 3-5 sites, they forced the addition of “Woot Plus” things to be sold that were far less of a deal and for more focused on selling things whether they were a good deal or not. Behind the scenes, it caused major chaos. CS was not given tools needed to help customers adequately and forced to do whatever they could to help customers. Amazon forced this change to the interface with customers to go live knowing it was not ready. As I explain more, you’ll see a pattern of never having the tools to adequately do the job and being forced to work around it all.

As time progressed, the people most responsible for Woot’s success prior to Amazon owning them left one by one. For most of them, it was when their stock would be awarded and they had enough shares to sell and walk away to do another endeavor or eventually had a role in starting up the Woot clone site of meh.com. You got a feeling they were all not fitting into the rigid structure of Amazon’s policies and procedures. 

In September 2013, I took a brief medical leave of absence because I had the second of two foot surgeries while I worked at Woot. My foot wasn’t healing properly and the nerves were doing some strange things. My boss at that time had wanted me to work 28 straight days with no day off because my surgeon would not clear me to return to work. After the 2 month leave of absence, I returned to find my boss was leaving the company as well, likely under similar circumstances to what ultimately led to my “resignation” which was really a setup for being fired under their Pivot plan. I was placed on a “coaching plan” when I returned because I followed directives of my former supervisor that caused conflict with other departments in the company. I was ultimately removed from this by the new supervisor who identified it should have never happened in his words. 

A couple months go by and the new boss encourages me to try to investigate some things internally to expand our skillsets more. I started to investigate why orders were not being delivered to some customers by reviewing what was termed the Order Aging Report. I felt I had found a bit of a niche doing this research most people consider to be very mundane and boring. I enjoyed finding the issues and correcting them. I started doing this in September 2014 and continued to work this project until February 2020. The work I was doing was handed off to the inventory team at that point. In that same month, I was given new tasks to perform. Less than 2 months later, I had my internal performance review. At that time, I was again placed on a coaching plan because the manager felt I was not meeting expectations on the goals. I will admit I was not because the tasks were so new to me. What’s strange, though, is I asked for an SOP for something assigned to me and only 2 days after I finally received it, I was placed on the coaching plan. I improved on the tasks given to me and ultimately removed from the coaching in May 2020. At no point was I informed that I could be placed on a Pivot plan once I had improved. A few months go by and the impression I get is I’m doing well at my job. 

In August 2020, my manager informed me she felt I was regressing some during a monthly 1-on-1 meeting. No areas of improvement were given for me in writing to specifically improve upon at that time. In my September 2020 1-on-1 meeting, I was informed I was being placed on the Pivot plan, where I finally got areas for improvement. By this point, I was already presented with the Pivot plan that finally did spell out, in writing, what I was needing improvement on. When you’re given the Pivot plan, you are offered a severance payout as well with it. So, in effect, you’re picking between taking the money offered to you or improve within 30 days. If you opt to go with the improve in 30 days offer, if you don’t improve, you get a much lower severance payout offer and fired. If you do succeed in improving, you stay but likely at as much, or greater, scrutiny by management on your duties. The document is basically a “guilty until you can prove yourself innocent” document. There’s no appeals process until you opt for the 30 days to improve, meaning if you get the severance offer or the option to improve, only then do you get to appeal and that’s it. You cannot appeal being placed on the Pivot in the first place.

I have asked for a copy of my HR file so I can see where I was written up or not and more for my own improvement purposes post-Amazon. My manager is supposed to provide it to me and, as of today, has not done so. I ended up taking the severance payout because, despite me reaching the goals my manager set up, I have no way to show that she’s “in the wrong” since no appeals process exists until it’s likely too late for it to matter. Even if I do show she’s wrong, it wouldn’t change the choices provided and being forced to take what’s in the best interest of your family. 

Long story short, the whole Pivot process is a joke. It’s basically designed to make Amazon look like there’s a process for halting terminations that may come back negatively on them. What the average person doesn’t know is it’s all just smoke and mirrors to supposedly be a check and balance for managers on a power trip. The problem is it doesn’t work in its present form. I’ve read somewhere that only 30 percent of those who take the improvement part of the Pivot plan get to stay. This should show the odds don’t favor the employee, even if they do everything they’re supposed to because all the decisions are made by a biased manager who can base decisions on emotions instead of productivity.