Pay To Quit News: Amazon chief Jeff Bezos exposed in the company's letter to shareholders what has to be the most counterintuitive personnel policy in corporate America today: If an employee isn't happy working at the online retail giant, they can earn up to $5,000 just for quitting.
Pat To Quit is a program that offers workers to quit. Bezos says, "Once a year, we offer to pay our associates to quit. The first year the offer is made, it's for $2,000. Then it goes up one thousand dollars a year until it reaches $5,000. The headline on the offer is 'Please Don't Take This Offer." Bezos labels it as one of the company's "better ways to do things internally."
According to Time, the Pay To Quit Program started at Amazon-owned Zappos, and the parent company adopted the concept for its fulfilment centers. On one hand, it sounds backwards. Companies pay their employees to work, not to not work.
Bill Taylor, author and Fast Company co-founder, in a Harvard Business Review blog post, probing this practice at Zappos back in 2008, says the quit money worked out costing less than the online shoe retailer would have lost if unmotivated employees put the brakes on its fast-paced corporate culture. He said, "Zappos wants to learn if there's a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick-and it's willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later."
"The goal is to encourage folks to take a moment and think about what they really want," Bezos expounds. "In the long-run, an employee staying somewhere they don't want to be isn't healthy for the employee or the company."
According to Los Angeles Times, it's a tactic used by other companies, such as Netflix Inc., as the Harvard Business Review noted in an article earlier this year.
"Adequate performance gets a generous severance package," Netflix's corporate mantra. Essentially, the company would rather have less-than-stellar personnel leave with money in their pocket and fill their spots with more talented employees.
Though the compensation offer by Netflix is only for its corporate employees, not those who work at their sorting facilities, the end result is a more engaged workforce, experts say, LA Times reported.
