Amazon has an 80-person orchestra just for employees
Amazon’s corporate culture is widely known for its dog-friendliness, its free community banana stands, and, notoriously, a challenging and even bruising work environment.
Less well-known is how Amazon (AMZN) — Yahoo Finance’s Company of the Year — helps employees channel their inner artist. In the last several years, Amazon has expanded its efforts so employees with artistic streaks have more creative outlets to let loose, including the Amazon Symphony and the a cappella group Vocally Self-Critical — a riff off of Amazon’s now retired 10th principle of the same name.
“About this time last year, one of our oboists looked through our employee directory and looked through people’s interests, particularly in classical musical instruments, and he just sent out this massive email, asking ‘Hey, who wants to start an orchestra?’” recalls Beau Curran, a technical account manager on Amazon’s digital music operations team and an oboist in the Amazon Symphony. “The first day of rehearsal, we were really wondering whether we’d just end up with a saxophonist and a keyboardist, and that would be our orchestra.”
To Curran and Amazon Symphony conductor Fred Clarke’s surprise, about 200 employees expressed interest in the group, with 80 instrumentalists now rehearsing weekly on-campus and performing at least twice a year. The company, for its part, contributes a budget sponsored by Amazon business teams, as well as rehearsal and performance space. It also opened up its large employee meeting center on-campus for the groups to perform their winter concert. The joint performance drew over 500 people and raised more than $18,000 in donations and ticket sales for Mary’s Place, a nonprofit that operates a shelter for homeless families in a building at Amazon’s Seattle headquarters.
Alexander Simms, an Amazon software engineer, joined the company in 2016 after his three-month internship at the company ended, in part because the company had an a cappella group. (Yes, really.)
“At the end of that internship, I actually heard that Amazon had an a cappella group called Vocally Self-Critical, which is a great pun that nobody gets anymore,” explains Simms, referring to the now defunct Amazon principle, which was folded into another leadership principle, Earn Trust. “It definitely influenced my coming back.”
Alexandra Rogers, head of global customer insights and strategy for Amazon Prime Now and a member of Vocally Self-Critical, expressed a similar sentiment.
“It’s amazing to be involved in Vocally Self-Critical and get to spend the day working on data and creatively putting it together and synthesizing insights and then get to come sing,” Rogers says. “Amazon’s culture allows you to be creative in and outside of your job role, and that’s something I really enjoy.”