Amazon’s People Person
A 50-YEAR-OLD FICUS NAMED RUBI. A RHODODENDRON TAXIFOLIUM from the Philippines, now extinct in the wild. The world’s secondlargest living wall.
I have come to Amazon’s urban campus in Seattle to meet Beth Galetti, the company’s senior VP of human relations. But instead of ushering me directly into a conference room, she offers me a guided tour of the Spheres, the three conjoined geodesic domes—containing 40,000 plants, seating areas, and good coffee—that Amazon opened last year on a former parking lot in the Denny Triangle neighborhood.
Part botanical wonderland and part work space, the glassencased Spheres are designed to let the thousands of Amazon staffers who toil in nearby buildings get away from it all without having to walk more than a few blocks from their desks. “We wanted to give our employees a place to experience nature,” explains Galetti, who is wearing a puffy winter jacket and floral scarf and is clearly having fun playing forest ranger. “When you’re in a typical office environment, the best you might get is a plant.”
The Spheres’ Edenesque splendor seems all the more striking after Galetti and I make the five-minute trek to the anodyne tower where she works. By the standards of enormous tech companies, her surroundings are willfully mundane, reflecting Amazon’s long-standing stance that it should be investing above all in delighting customers rather than its own creature comforts: “It sets the tone for our frugality,” she says. Her office is tiny—three visitors would constitute a crowd—and sports few accoutrements other than a standing desk and the requisite shelf of family photos. (In one, Galetti poses with her beaming dad during an Amazon “Bring Your Parents to Work” day.)
Like most—okay, all—HR executives, the 46-year-old Galetti isn’t exactly famous. But in her nearly six years at Amazon, three as a division leader, she
