Workplace ‘despair closet’ anyone?

Workplace ‘despair closet’ anyone?

In its bid to improve its reputation around employee treatment and experience, Amazon has introduced ‘WorkingWell’, an ‘employee-designed’ health and safety programme for all of its US operations.

The move comes in the wake of years of criticism from former and current staff at the online retail company on social media and in newspaper reports. Amazon had been accused of limiting toilet breaks and trying to find ways to fire staff without any human involvement, through digital-only processes.

AmaZen?

WorkingWell includes access for staff to an AmaZen in the workplace, an “individual interactive kiosk” where employees can spend their break time watching “videos featuring easy-to-follow wellbeing activities, including guided meditations, positive affirmations, calming scenes with sounds, and more”.

The idea of the booths hasn’t gone down well. A quick, cheap and inhuman response to the very real and complicated problems that affect employee wellbeing – many of them rooted in financial problems and a sense of not being valued as individuals. On social media the booths have become known as “despair closets” or “cry closets”, the box where staff go to hide. “I feel like liveable wages & working conditions are better than a mobile despair closet,” said one Amazon employee.

How to care

“As the past year has demonstrated, employee wellbeing is a fundamental issue, the heart of productivity, performance and organisational resilience,” says EAPA UK chair Eugene Farrell.

“Employers need to beware of ticking the box on employee wellbeing with schemes that lack substance, that can’t begin to address the range of concerns and challenges facing people in the Covid-19 era.

“Wellbeing needs to be backed with investment and an acknowledgment of the importance of human contact and relationships. Not everything can be solved with access to instant digital content.”

Workplace ‘despair closet’ anyone? Eugene Farrell