What Happens When Tech Employees Work to Incite Change in the Workplace?

Many tech startups chose to add an extra perk to employee benefits as they were first starting up by offering stock to workers as a form of compensation. The benefit to employers in doing this is that it helps employees to feel invested in the overall success of the company.

This year, employees have found their voices and have started to use those stock shares to stand up for causes they believe in that they feel the company they work for can, and should, take a stand on.

Photo by Heather Mount on Unsplash

Potential Change at Amazon

In an unprecedented move, more than a dozen employees at Amazon that hold stock grants chose to exercise their rights by filing identical shareholder petitions to create and release a plan to address climate change.

This seems to be the first time that employees of a tech company have chosen to take charge and file their own proposal as shareholders! The proposal will be submitted for a vote at Amazon’s annual shareholder meeting in the Spring with the intention being to ask the board how it plans to respond to climate change and reduce company dependence on fossil fuels.

The employees that signed the petition believe that they have the right and responsibility as stakeholders at Amazon to bring visibility to the important issues going on at their workplace. Company policy is that employees must own at least $2,000 of stock for a year before they’re able to file a proposal.

Amazon has already made sizeable changes to how they source their energy needs. The company plans to invest heavily in renewable energy sources aimed at energy efficient innovations with a plan to be fully sustainable on renewable energy.

Photo by David Larivière on Unsplash

More Change at Google

In March 2018, Google employees took part in a petition by Zevin Asset Management that proposed linking the compensation of executives to company diversity and inclusion goals. The difference with that situation was that the proposal was never formally filed but was presented during the Alphabet annual shareholder meeting. Alphabet is the parent company of Google.

The result was that the informal proposal was shot down but sources within Google have stated that there is a plan in place to resubmit the proposal formally to be presented at the 2019 annual shareholder meeting.

More Activism

Last month, 20,000 employees at Google walked out in protest because of high paid executive employees that had been accused of sexual harassment, which resulted in the company issuing an apology and putting an end to forced arbitration in cases like those.

These moves by tech employees are not the norm and are causing quite a stir in the industry. Activism is not something usually seen in most companies and this seems to be making founders of these companies nervous about the future. Hopefully, the two camps of employees and executives are able to find common ground where both parties will benefit.

What do you think is coming next in this situation and how can companies move into more socially acceptable business practices?

Thanks for reading!

Jeff