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Official Amazon HR document reveals a spike in employees put on PIPs during a time of record layoffs

The document shows Amazon put more staff into its Focus and Pivot programs from spring 2022 through early 2023. That's when record layoffs happened.

"In order to maintain a high and rising performance bar, we plan to refresh part of the employee population each year," Amazon's PXT team wrote in early 2023, according to the document obtained by BI. "The number of performance-improvement plans goes up because you draw the performance-requirement line higher than you did when you weren't doing a reduction in force," Erik Gordon, a business professor at the University of Michigan, said while discussing PIPs in general. Amazon put many more employees on performance-improvement plans at a time when the company was also conducting the largest layoffs in its history, according to an official human-resources document from last year obtained by Business Insider.

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