Amazon Case Study

Arjun Jaganath Shetty 2124626

1. Does the people management strategy of compassion and care do good business
sense?

Yes, employers want to get the best from their employees if you show them you care about

them. I believe that in return for the care and compassion, employees’ performance will be

higher than before, they become loyal to the organization. But here, the organization needs to

think about the standards of Care and Compassion. It does not make sense that organizations

bear all the irregularities and show compassion for their employees. But I agree that the

people management strategy of care and compassion makes business sense because care

means a lot for the people, and I think care makes people liable to return in back; in

organizations if you care about your employees, the return will be the performance. So, this

is a valuable strategy, and it makes business sense after all employers need is performance

and productivity. The purpose of business is to improve people’s lives, not only to make a

profit. A profit is a requirement for survival but not the only target. It is the main target of

shareholders, but shareholders are only one of the groups of stakeholders who have made an

investment and are interested in the business. So if you look at a company as more than a

vehicle for shareholder enrichment, it makes total business sense.

I also think that it can improve the performance and retention of the staff and reduce the need

to use “greed and fear” as management tools lowering costs further. So I believe it can also

be of economic benefits to the shareholders if applied well. It is essential for employees of a

business organization to work hard and for long hours and act smartly when it comes to

fulfilling shareholders' wealth maximization. Care and compassion sometimes lead to

unethical behavior in the restriction of performing new and challenging tasks and
accomplishing assignments on time, leading to losses to business organizations. Innovation is

the key driver to success for a business organization in the industry that demands a highly

talented, workaholic, competitive, and passionate workforce rather than a workforce that

seeks compassion and care from team leaders. It will hinder the process of continuous

innovation and opportunity of employees’ professional growth, thus leading to the failure of

a business.

For a business organization, the most crucial motivational factor that keeps them going is the

profit generated from business operations to meet shareholders’ expectations and increase its

valuation in the stock market. Care and compassion do not generate profit and satisfy the

goals of shareholders. Hence it becomes senseless for a business to focus upon it. Investors

investigate the company's financial statistics while investing in it rather than inculcating care

and compassion in an organization’s corporate culture.

2. How does the practice of keeping employees on the edge impact business in the short
and long term?

In the short run, keeping employees on edge impacts business positively in terms of

increased productivity, effectiveness, efficiency, and thus the company's overall profitability.

It will facilitate employees to take on new challenges at the workplace, explore new business

ideas, innovate, complete tasks on time and remain competitive among peers, which is

crucial for the sustainability and growth of a business organization. It will foster employees

to learn new things faster, improve morale, and a sense of achievement while performing

tasks at the workplace. It will help managers easily differentiate between the most efficient
and least efficient workforce in the organisation6, thus enabling the process of training and

development to be more effective and sound in the organization.

Overall performance of employees at the workplace will substantiate the success of the

organisation7. The organization will be embraced with an efficient pool of talents motivated

to bring the company to the industry’s top position and increase its profitability. It will

facilitate eagerness among employees to collaborate, learn from their teammates and perform

challenging tasks placed upon them in a fast-changing global environment to become

achievers who have the capability and willpower to create history and pave the way for

success for themselves and the organization as well. It will increase accountability and boost

the coping abilities of employees at the workplace to remain confident, effective, and

efficient in accomplishing tasks assigned to them8. It helps them focus on integrating their

growth with organizational growth, work with little or no supervision, and make them

proactive and street smart.

However, in the long run, keeping employees at the edge will adversely impact business

organizations. Employees’ fear of inability to meet expectations and standards set up by

organizations on time will put employees in distress in the long run leading to a high attrition

rate, low productivity, and feeling of discontent among employees in the organization.

Keeping employees on edge affects the long term and short term impact on the employer's

brand. The employer’s brand will experience increased growth in the short run since all the

employees will ensure that they work at the optimum level to ensure they have sustained

employment. Some employers think that having people constantly feeling they are at risk of
losing their job helps to motivate them. It is the opposite. Long term, it will lead to stress,

which hurts performance. Short term, it destabilizes the team, causing conflict, undue

competition, and potentially leading to a negative impact on performance. The impact they

had was that the other employees often would run around like idiots and get nothing done.

The systems they had in place were bureaucratic, sometimes irrelevant to our jobs. Some

people do not understand that activity does not necessarily equal productivity.

Simply by letting them know that they are highly valued and appropriate, their work efforts

do not go unnoticed, and their set of job skills are essential to the growth of the business. Let

them know that the company wishes that it had more workers like them, and a slight rise here

and there would not hurt either. Just a little something to show them that they are really

appreciated there and sometimes have a small employee appreciation dinner now, and then,

nothing significant - something for efforts at work and that is all appreciated. Will keep the

workforce looking forward to each workday employed there. Little things like this will show

employees that they care about how hard they are working each day, and the jobs they are

doing do matter to that business.

3. Is Amazon’s employer brand as reported in the New York Times sustainable? Why or
why not?

Amazon has been criticized for putting employees working for long hours, building pressure

on employees through a peer review system, and promoting employees to attack each other at

the workplace. The work environment at Amazon is very competitive and pressure building
where employees have to compete and obstruct each other to survive at Amazon. However,

Amazon as an employer brand seems to be sustainable. It has established itself as an

employer brand for those willing to work under pressure, learn and perform challenging tasks

and foster constant innovation and creativity for the future. The work philosophy at Amazon

is that employees have to work hard, intelligent and long, and one cannot compromise on any

of three10. Employees’ motive at Amazon is to adopt challenges as an opportunity to grow,

enjoy the work and create history in the world. Customer satisfaction and value creation for

its customers through continuous innovation and customer support is the top priority of

Amazon.

The corporate culture of Amazon demands that employees use unconventional methods to

generate innovative solutions to the problems that exist at the workplace to succeed in

cutthroat competition prevailing in the industry and attain market leadership. Amazon as an

employer suits those ready to take challenges in the fast-changing competitive environment,

become the forefront for technological innovations, and are full of ambitions in terms of

career growth & development, success achievement, and wealth accumulation. It works on

the philosophy of facing extreme demands at the workplace instead of running away,

considering it as a problem for them but as an opportunity for career growth and

technological advancement in their skills and capability. It fosters an environment where

people are enthusiastic about working on cutting-edge projects with innovative ideas and

solutions and ready to learn from their team members at the workplace who are thriving on

meeting the expectations of billions of its customers and achieve success individually and for

the organization. Amazon seeks employees who shine under pressure, are high performers
and have a strong emotional quotient. It considers its employees as a pool of talent and

facilitates training of employees to increase their capability and develop their personalities.

Its training program enables employees to understand what is being expected from them and

get engaged with the work culture at Amazon. It will facilitate the smooth functioning of

employees at the workplace as per the standards and norms set by Amazon and avoid

conflicts.

Human resource activities such as training and development, performance appraisal, pay, and

perks are designed effectively and systematically to achieve the corporate and strategic goals

of Amazon, such as continuous innovation and technological advancement to create value for

its customers and increase revenue for the company. Usually, small teams are formed with

the main motive to reduce differences, promote employees' self-management, and invest a

considerable chunk of money in the training and development of its employees. The

company also supports sharing information at inter and department levels to encourage

creativity and learn things from each other to facilitate fast resolution and decision making.

Amazon’s policy to hire talented people from diverse backgrounds is the key to fulfilling its

objective of constant innovation and maintaining competitiveness in the long run. It

considers gifted employees as a source of competitive advantage and thus focuses on

attracting innovative people and having a firm belief in Amazon. To attract and retain talent,

it shares profit among its employees.

It offers more incentives to employees who serve the company for more than two years than

new employees with a motive to retain such talents who are highly involved with the
organization and reduce training costs. The company offers the best pay and perks to attract

talented personnel to the organization. Performance-based incentives and signing bonuses are

integral parts of the packages provided to its employees.

Performance appraisal is based on self-evaluation and peer assessment. Before 2016, the

Performance of employees was ranked, and those who performed worst were dismissed from

the company. But now, the company has changed this policy and started a retraining program

called Pivot to train its underperforming employees and offer them a chance to improve their

performance. The company takes regular feedback regarding the working environment from

employees. It has a daily question and answers feedback program called Connections to

understand its workforce and problems faced by them. It has ‘Forte’ an Employee review

program that focuses on employees’ strengths rather than their weaknesses, thus motivating

employees positively towards the organization. Amazon plans to retrain its one lakh

employees investing $700 million. It has plans to expand its training programs. It adds new

training programs to improve the quality of its workforce and retain talented and future-ready

employees at the workplace to foster constant innovation creativity and meet its

commitments to become a top employer brand in the industry. The Amazon personnel model

described by the Times is very similar to the old pre-union sweatshop model that still exists

in some businesses in the US and abroad even today. Amazon has successfully branded the

model as embodying a modern version of traditional values, “work long, hard and smart,”

and they have spent a lot of money advertising that they care deeply for their workers,

particularly during the current pandemic. The question is whether they can successfully

reward workers psychically and with financial and other perquisites to attract and retain
 enough employees to fill the positions they need. It must be working for them now, or they

would not be doing it. It is probably easier to implement sweatshop work for some groups of

employees than for others. Still, it may significantly attract creative and productive

individuals outside of the norm. For that reason, it is unlikely that they apply the model as

simple as the Times describes.

It is undoubtedly the case that the Times has overgeneralized and overstated the HR policies

for a company with almost 1 million employees that have nearly doubled the number of its

workers in about three years.

It is also impossible that a company as large and successful as Amazon does not vary its

employment practices among its employees while it aggressively brands its employment

practices in a way that maximizes its employment applications, enables it to be selective, and

maximizes its yield on job offers to people it wants to attract at every level.

4. Are employees thriving under Amazon’s workplace policies? Or are they just barely
surviving?

Employees are thriving and just barely surviving under Amazon's workplace policies.

Amazon is a technology-driven company that is customer-obsessed and innovation-centric.

Employees passionate about what they do at Amazon to innovate new products and services to

create history, earn big, and become star performers thrive under Amazon's workplace policies.

Employees ready to sacrifice their work-life balance and enjoy career advancement by fulfilling

extreme demands rising at the workplace are thriving, not surviving in Amazon. These people

are willing to work 24/7, reply to emails sent to them at midnight, highly enthusiastic, ready to

take the pain on behalf of the company to satisfy expectations of customers, meet high set

standards of performance, ready to collaborate with the workforce, learn and adopt new skills,
give innovative and creative insights, work on challenging and cutting edge projects, willing to

accept challenging jobs as an initiative to grow and prosper in their career rather than problems

and escape from it. Employees deeply rooted in Amazon's work culture and belief in working

hard, being intelligent, long, having fun, and creating history are advancing in their careers and

prospering while working at Amazon. These employees enjoy working in an unconventional,

competitive, and fast-changing environment with a motive to do out of box things for the welfare

of the company and customers and earn a strong reputation in terms of enormous pay and

promotion. Constant criticism of ideas and opinions of peers, attending late-night meetings,

sending feedback to others' bosses anonymously to sabotage each other are some of the features

which otherwise employees thriving at Amazon do not like but for the sake of success in their

career and organizational growth, they feel correct to do so. Amazon's effective training

programs regularly help employees' career growth and personality development accept new

challenges and get adept at them.

 There are various reasons why employees find that they are merely surviving under Amazon's

policies: Employees at Amazon find they are surrounded by highly skilled and talented people

who are highly boosted to think creatively to overcome new operational challenges, devise

innovative ideas to pave the path of success and meet the expectation of the company and

customers. A cut-throat competitive working environment creates enormous pressure to perform

and surpass their teammates to survive. Long hours of operation create mental stress and anxiety,

sometimes leading to frustration and depression. Working even at vacation and constant

overtime destroys work-life balance and thus hampers employees' well-being. Surviving

Employees find no support from management about work-life balance. Standards of performance
set at Amazon are unexpectedly too high and unavoidable, which creates pressure and distress

among employees leading to job dissatisfaction and fear of job loss.

A culture of promoting unnecessary competition among co-workers and criticizing peers' ideas in

meetings prompts star performers to succeed in careers and low performers to quit the job. The

company's culture to not include women in top management hinders female employees' career

growth and advancement, against women empowerment guidelines. The yearly performance

review process is based on rankings where managers discuss subordinates' rankings. Employees

are encouraged to criticize their peers by sending feedback to top management, and low

performers are thrown out of the company. However, Amazon has changed this policy and

launched a retraining program to give a chance to low performers to improve their performance

and meet the expected standard.21

 There is a fear in the mind of old employees that new and young employees will replace them as

Amazon encourages to promote the dismissal of senior employees with more commitments in

terms of responsibility towards family, parents due to which they will not be able to focus on

work and contribute extra time to company as compared to young employees who have fewer

commitments and more time to focus on work. Management of Amazon is not sensitive towards

employees who suffer from severe diseases such as cancer, miscarriages, or some personal crisis.

Such employees are not given adequate time to recover and perform with their highest ability,

are evaluated unreasonably on a performance scale, and dismissed. This inhuman behavior and

workplace policies hinder employees' survival at Amazon and exhibit cruelty on the part of

management's responsibilities towards its employees.

Thanks,

Arjun Shetty