Exclusive: Amazon’s attrition costs $8 billion annually according to leaked documents. And it gets worse.

Amazon churns through workers at an astonishing rate, well above industry averages. According to a tranche of documents marked “Amazon Confidential” provided to Engadget and not previously reported on, that staggering attrition now has an associated cost. “[Worldwide] Consumer Field Operations is experiencing high levels of attrition (regretted and unregretted) across all levels, totaling an estimated $8 billion annually for Amazon and its shareholders,” one of the documents, authored earlier this year, states. For a sense of scale, the company’s net profit for its 2021 fiscal year was $33.36 billion.

The documents, which include several internal research papers, slide decks and spreadsheets, paint a bleak picture of Amazon’s ability to retain employees, and how the current strategy may be financially harmful to the organization as a whole. They also broadly condemn Amazon for not adequately using or tracking data in its efforts to train and promote employees, an ironic shortcoming for a company which has a reputation for obsessively harvesting consumer information. These documents were provided to Engadget by a source who believes these gaps in accounting represent a lack of internal controls.

“Regretted attrition” – that is, workers choosing to leave the company – “occurs twice as often as unregretted attrition” …read more