OGL 481 Pro-Seminar I:

PCA-Structural Frame Worksheet

1) Briefly restate your situation from Module 1 and your role.

When COVID-19 hit in mid-March 2020, Amazon quickly responded by following the
CDC guidelines and providing additional safety protocols and other necessities to ensure
their employees remained as safe as possible. My job was to enforce these new guidelines
for safety at work while maintaining peak efficiency within my department.

2) Describe how the structure of the organization influenced the situation.

The primary structure of Amazon is a top-down chain of command. Bolman and Deal
described it in chapter 5 as a simple hierarchy where those doing the reporting are giving
the information to their superiors (2021). In this case, the information flowed the other
way so that a single person was disseminating it to several of their subordinates. How
Amazon was structured was repeated throughout the company through multiple stages
down to the entry-level employees. Provided a lot of information for those in the lower
tiers of the organization but did not allow for feedback or open conversations about how
this would impact day-to-day activities.

With so few key personnel making the decisions, mandated protocols reached the highest
level of restrictions. The restrictions included an order for wearing facial covering,
remaining six feet apart, and staying home should any illness arrives within a person.
They were handling this pandemic with a rigid structure that allowed for little to no
feedback from the masses that had to implement these protocols immediately.
Organizations with a one-size-fits-all mentality tend to fall victim to disastrous results
(Bolman and Deal, 2021). In this case, despite their efforts, Amazon fell into this same
failing pattern.

3) Recommend how you would use a structure for an alternative course of action
regarding your case.

An alternative structure could have been to use the “star” (Bolman and Deal, 2021). By
utilizing its mode, a more significant number of opinions and points of view are
considered and enacted. At the beginning of the crisis, a singular, firm voice made sense,
but a new structure overlaying the first to create greater efficiency and communication.
The positive effects would have been twofold by utilizing this structure instead of a rigid
hierarchy. The first is that decisions would have less likely been made in a reactionary
fashion and, therefore, better implemented engaged based on the severity of each given
situation.

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 Secondly, it would have opened up two-way communication for support and
conversations so that employees could feel that their opinions were being heard and
provide better Intel on the true impact of the initial regulations. Logically speaking,
people are more likely to deal with a negative or uncomfortable situation if they feel
heard and their opinions considered, whether or not the outcome is genuinely favorable
for them.

4) Reflect on what you would do or not do differently, given what you have learned
about this frame.

I would not have changed anything for the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic. A
robust top-down authoritative system left little ambiguity about what needed to happen in
the immediate future. By providing that guidance and the structure of a simple hierarchy,
each person knew their requirements and the protocols that were being put in place for
the safety of the individual and the company as a whole. This structure allowed for
minimal disruption in the day-to-day operations, thus minimizing the initial impact of
deliverables produced through the company.
I would have deviated upon stabilization, reaching a point of near normality, and then
restructured the initial protocols with feedback from those it impacted the most. By
decentralizing choices on how best to keep personnel and customers safe, those within
the warehouses could have reframed protocols to enhance productivity and comfort
within each warehouse. It also had a secondary effect of reducing the turnover at the
lowest level to the ability to get direct feedback from personnel. With this feedback,
slight restructuring or altering protocols would have made people feel like their voices
were heard and that the company they worked for recognized them as human beings
rather than just workers to make the corporation money. As a “peon” at the beginning of
the pandemic, I heard firsthand grumblings the corporation was only looking out for the
whole rather than the individual. Giving people a voice gives them a chance to vent their
frustrations, provide feedback, and feel like they are part of the solution, even if the
explanation given them is ultimately not what they wanted.

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 Reference

Bolman, L. G., & Deal, T. E. (2021). Reframing  organizations: Artistry, choice, and

leadership (7th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass