Amazon wants employees to show their impact in performance reviews. Here’s what HR needs to know about this approach.

Mixing things up this performance review season? You’re not alone.

Amazon’s corporate employees were asked, as part of their annual review, to demonstrate the value they bring to the organization by detailing three to five accomplishments from the past year, Business Insider reported.

According to the internal guidelines seen by Business Insider, “Accomplishments are specific projects, goals, initiatives, or process improvements that show the impact of your work. Consider situations where you took risks or innovated, even if it didn’t lead to the results you hoped for.” This marks a shift from previous review cycles, during which employees were asked to respond to “broader questions” about their goals, interests, and achievements. (Amazon declined HR Brew’s request for comment.)

Elon Musk took a similar approach to performance management at Twitter in 2022 and with the federal government in 2025, asking employees to prove their weekly and daily contributions, PBS News reported.

“It makes sense to have people identify things that, ‘I have done that equaled a result,’ and I think that the intent behind it is to allow people to feel like they have some like agency or responsibility for making that happen for themselves,” Wendy Lee Berger, global lead for client service and operations at leadership development and change management consultancy Impact, told HR Brew.

But there needs to be “balance,” she added, between clear job expectations and accomplishments. “If you start with just, ‘these are the metrics I want from you…and this is the only thing,’ that’s heavy handed,” she said.

What’s going on? Amazon has made some significant changes affecting its corporate workforce in recent years, including laying off staff, issuing a stringent RTO mandate, and shifting its compensation model to reward higher-performing employees.

Coming out of the pandemic, many companies felt like they “didn’t have tight enough control” or “employees weren’t hitting their targets,” according to Berger, resulting in a move from empathy to accountability. Some employers, like Amazon, as well as AT&T and JPMorgan, responded by applying a more metric-driven approach to performance management.

But performance management centered on measurable accomplishments can stifle innovation, Berger said. “Some of the things that are required for growth and innovation, they’re hard to measure. Like even if you were to say, ‘Okay, we need you to be more creative’...How do you measure creativity?” she said.

It may be easier to measure an accomplishment by whether it led to “more dollar signs,” Berger said, but “if we’re incentivizing them to be able to meet those metrics and not necessarily stretch outside of them, then you get what you measure…You’re going to get a certain behavior that may not serve your long-term aspirations as an organization.”

This type of performance management can also create issues when it’s not done transparently, Jasmine Escalera, a career expert at LiveCareer, told HR Brew. “It feels very much like we are trying to do this to track you, to have surveillance over you, or because we don’t trust you, then that’s where this becomes a trust issue and a problem,” she said.

What can HR do? As with any change, employees may have mixed reactions, which, Berger said, is normal. She recommended HR pros encourage managers to focus less on what the change is and more on how they’re communicating, Escalera said. Announcing a change without an explanation of how it could benefit employees may potentially cause resistance.

Performance management conversations should also be an “opportunity for managers to get more data [and] to have these kinds of more human conversations,” Berger said. “When the data trumps everything else, or that metric is the only thing that’s happening, and there’s no development conversation…then, you’ve got these sad employees who are completely unmoored, left to their own, hoping that they hit the right metric.”

Instead, data can be presented as “this is to empower you” and leveraged to advocate for promotions or pay raises, Escalera said. “If it’s utilized as a way to really help the employee, this is freaking phenomenal because now you’re putting some power into the hands of employees.”

“When it’s talked about in terms of monitoring, surveillance, or even potentially like, ‘This is what will help us decide whether we’re going to keep you or cut you.’ That’s unacceptable,” she added. “That means you don’t trust your employees. You’re not trying to help your employees.”