Analyse The People Practices Of Amazon †MyAssignmenthelp.com

Question: Discuss about the Analyse The People Practices Of Amazon. Answer: Brief Introduction Human resource department is paramount to the success of any business organization. It is the efficiency, effectiveness and the practices of HR department which ensures the accomplishment and achievement of the business objectives and goals (Conway, Fu, Monks, Alfes Bailey, 2016). The scope of the report here is to understand and analyse the people practices of Amazon, the levels of employee engagement and recommended strategies to improve the employee engagement process. The report will also highlight the best practices of employee engagement andpeople management followed at Amazon. Overview of the Organization Amazon.com is the worlds largest e-commerce website which was started in the year 1994 by Jeff Bezos; the company disrupted the entire shopping model since its inception. Amazon, which started as an online book seller way back in 1994, currently sells anything to everything through its web platform. Millions of products are daily sold on Amazon, the company which is spread across 18 countries and sells its product across 180 countries is also touted as one of the best companies to work with. Amazon presently employees over 5, 60,000 people which are effectively allocated to its business verticals (Valera Patel, 2018). Amazon has been riding high on the trajectory of success since it opened to online audience, the company have been growing at 28% CAGR and made revenue of 178 Billion USD from the sales on Amazon website, Its Cloud services and Amazon prime services. The company is one of the worlds largest customer-centric companies of the world and believes in the statement If the company takes care of its customers, the customers will take care of its shareholders(Thakur, 2018). Identification and Discussion of HR Strategy Amazon has made tremendous improvement in its HR policies since employees raised concern regarding work life balance. Ever since, the company has shown considerable improvement in its HR strategy to improve the productivity and morale of its employees. Some of the strategies of HR at Amazon are: The company aims to improve its HRmanagement capabilities by using its cloud services platform at the optimum level. The company keeps going through the databases of the employees to better understand them and find suitable methods to motivate them. HR at Amazon are coming up with various programs like Family day, family vacation, team building exercises, great leave policies, entertainment zone et to keep its employees satisfied and motivated at their jobs(Pathak, 2016) Amazon gives full leverage to its employees to choose which ever department they want to work in, this helps in employee empowerment and certainly helps in building a better connection with the company(Payne Abegaz, 2018) HR at Amazon also believes that if they take care of their employees, they will take good care of their customer. Moving forward with this strategy Amazon has been showing great improvements in its employee turnover rate (Schmidt, Pohler Willness, 2018). Evaluation of HR Policies Amazon was considered to be a ruthless employer until 2015; the company opened its eyes towards the employees when the company was facing flak from its employees on online and offline platforms. Ever since, Amazon decided to change the unpleasant scenario and understood the importance of work-life balance and engagement for its employees (Payne, Mendoza Horner, 2018). Some of the game changes policies of Amazon are: Development of a Pivot program for the underperforming employees, the company gave them three options for the way forward. Leave the company with severance, get into a pilot program of training to acquire the lacking skill set or challenge the managers appeal to place them in the performance improvement program. This sure gave employees a lot of options to evaluate in order to improve their performance. Creation of post called Career Ambassadors, the role of career ambassadors would be to walk on the flow, guide and support the employees. Removal of the policy of Rank Yank which used to slot employees into three categories based on rewarding the employees who promote themselves, penalize the employees who are less adept and productivity. This method was the base for majority of the criticism of Amazons HR policies; the company changed it to a better 360 degree balanced feedback to improve their performance. Some other highlights of the HR policy at Amazon are: Healthy, safe, fun and a happy place to work Performance linked incentives and bonus Knowledge sharing Performance evaluation Employee engagement Delighting the employees with unexpected returns Current state of Employee engagement Internal competition- Amazon follows a functional organization structure and has lot of departments under its hood. In order to ensure great team building, Amazon keeps on organizing healthy competition between different teams catering to different departments. This apart from ensuring employee engagement also helps in building motivation and spirit of team building amongst the employees (Rossman, 2016) Events- Amazon lifestyle and fashion events are one of the highlight of the companys engagement methods. The events are organized and fully created by the teams working at Amazon; the employees take a sense of pride in creating such events which also ensures employee engagement. Reward and recognition-Amazon believes in a fair evaluation process and thus gives special importance to its Reward and Recognition. The company sends its employees on month long vacation who have been performing exceptionally well and takes good care of them financially. This also serves as a good medium of engagement, as the peers are also involved in voting for the best employees. Further, cultural nights and celebration of important events at Amazons campus builds the employee engagement. 360 degree balanced feedback- 360 Degree balanced feedback is one of the best method to evaluate the performance of an employee, the best part of the performancemanagement system is the engagement it drives among the employees. In a situation when everybody is rating everyone, people do ensure that their behaviour is right with their peers and seniors so that they do not get bad ratings during evaluation (Sunstein, 2016). Recommendation In order to ensure higher engagement levels, Amazon has to step away from the traditional ways of engaging the employees and move to a more culturally balanced engagement process. Some of the ways to ensure the above mentioned are: Making employees a part of Decision Making- In the present environment, wherein employees are the life and blood of the business, ensuring they are engaged at various levels is very crucial for the organization. Every employee joins an organization for his personal gain, professional or both. In any of the circumstances, an employee will definitely feel empowered if the organization is involving him in important decision making process. If his feedback is valued and implemented by the management, it creates a situation of employee delight, and the employee is always engaged in the process, policies and procedures of the organization (Armstrong Taylor, 2014) Discussing personal goals- Big organization often get into the zone where they are more focussed on revenues and profitability, in the process they leave their employees far behind. Amazon has to ensure that it never leaves its employees in limbo while the company is moving forward. The company has to ensure that they meet the employees, set goals for them, review and monitor the goals and give necessary feedback to the employees. The alignment of the personal goals has to be with the goals and objectives of the organization, this will help the employees to realize that the organization values their role and contribution. Open house discussion and feedback mechanism- It becomes really difficult to manage employees in a big organization, one on one meeting, personal interviews and feedback session becomes difficult to realize. In such cases, organization has to look for the open forum discussion and feedback mechanism to ensure that the employees are engaged and can give voice to their opinion about the business process, HR policies Practices, point of dissatisfaction in their jobs and any of their concern. By using the platform of open house, a large impact can be made on the employees and voicing their opinion, advice or feedback will certainly drive engagement of the employees with the organization (Mann Harter, 2016). Social Media for Businesses- Facebook has recently launched its feature of Facebook for business, the organization should try to incorporate the same within their existing process and motivate the employees to join Facebook for business. Through the social media application, the employees can stay in close contact and touch with their senior managers, CXOs or even their peers, this exclusive platform will drive the same result for the employees as brands drive for its customers by engaging them through a lot of organic and in-organic content(Stelzner, 2014) Conclusion Some time back, Amazon was considered to be a ruthless employer, it was said that the company only cares about its customers and not its employees.Management on getting to know the perception of the employees did a radical change in their HR policies and engagement process to better engage with the employees and reduce the turnover rate. Employee engagement is the relationship between the employer and the employee; it is a state where the employee is completely absorbed and enthusiastic about his job. It has been recommended to Amazon to empower its employees by including them in decision making, discussing and setting goals for them, engaging them through social media and give them a platform to voice their opinion in open feedback forums. Implementation of all these points will ensure that every Amazonite is motivated, productive and engaged with the organization. References Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S., 2014.Armstrong's handbook of human resource management practice. Kogan Page Publishers. Conway, E., Fu, N., Monks, K., Alfes, K. and Bailey, C., 2016. Demands or resources? The relationship between HR practices, employee engagement, and emotional exhaustion within a hybrid model of employment relations.Human Resource Management,55(5), pp.901-917. Mann, A. and Harter, J., 2016. The worldwide employee engagement crisis.Gallup Business Journal,7. Pathak, A.A., 2016. 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