employees at amazon

Amazon.com is a full-fledged online business conglomerate that sells books, music CDs, video games, and DVDs, and many other brands (Amazon.com 1998, p. 3). To a large extent, the company's corporate strategy and activities are focused on the e-commerce side. The e-commerce twist was inspired by Amazon.com creator Jeff Bezos, who wished to include a virtual bookstore for book lovers (Al Imran 2014, p. 3). Jeff Bezos, a Princeton University computer science and electrical engineering graduate, had just retired from D.E. Shaw, a Wall Street investment firm when he agreed to launch Amazon. At the time, he knew very little concerning the internet but was fascinated by statistics that reported how fast the internet was evolving and e-sales bulging at 2300% (Krishnamurthy 2002, p. 1). Assured more than ever that e-sales was a good market niche, Bezos proceeded to set up the company in Seattle, Washington. The company was originally set up in a garage but later transformed into an online shop for people that fancied online retailing of books. Bezos had originally envisaged the company as an online bookseller but later on proceeded to integrate other products such as the music CDS, DVDs, and computer games as well. The firm transformed into a fully-fledged virtual shop, operating only online, in the year 1995 (Amazon.com 2015, p. 3); two years later, the company became public.

Amazon.com now is one of the most recognized e-retailers, particularly for books, on its official website, www.amazon.com. As Krishnamurthy (2002, p. 1) says, the firm provides its clientele an exclusive, high-caliber shopping ordeal by ensuring that clients get value, eminence, and a high grade of customer service. Employees at Amazon.com are egged on to proffer excellent customer handling and after care services in a bid to paint a good and professional image of the company. Many studies such as Krishnamurthy (2002) and Al Imran (2014) discuss how Amazon is a multinational American company that deals with cloud computing as well as the sale of electronics to the consumers it serves, but leave out how Amazon’s employees are treated at the workplace. Indeed, the company has gained reputation over the years to be one of the leading companies in its industry based on the revenues they are able to generate and the size of the company. The company has also established operations in diverse countries and its continual adoption of state of the art technology has enabled it to remain a market leader (Al Imran 2014, p. 4). In this light, one would therefore expect that employees at the organization get significant perks and benefits from the amount of revenue that the company is able to generate. It would also be assumed that the company’s success may be attributed to the work ethics of their employees; however, this is not the case at the ground. Many of the former as well as current employees at Amazon have stepped up to enlighten the world about their horrific experiences working at the organization. This paper investigates the organizational behaviors rationality and bureaucracy & culture at Amazon using a case study whose link is provided for in the Appendix section (see Appendix 1). The case study contains enough details about Amazon.com and its workplace, allowing for an in-depth analysis and understanding of the organization’s context of culture and power.

Body

This section discusses the organizational culture, rationality, and bureaucracy that are currently in use at Amazon.com. Doina, Mirela, and Constantin (2008, p. 559) define organizational culture as the framework of collective ideologies, principles, and business concepts shared amongst the members of a particular business entity. These business concepts are extremely influential as they have a rather strong bearing on the organization’s members; they determine the operations therein regarding how people carry out their responsibilities, the dress code, and behave during the working hours (LaGuardia 2008, p. 56). Needle (2004, p. 12) asserts that organization culture is an end result of various aspects such as the consumer market, business strategy, workforce, government intervention, technological integration, as well as the management method that are integrated into a company. According to LaGuardia (2008, p. 56), organizational culture is concerned with the way a firm carries out its business operations, handles its employees, relates with its clientele, as well as the rest of the society. Bureaucracy, on the other hand, refers to the prevailing structure and style of management in a given organization (Jacoby 1973, p. 11). Hornstein and De Guerre (2006, p. 3) refer to a bureaucratic organization as an establishment that practices very hard-lined and strict regulations; one that is unwilling to compromise or adjust its objectives or policies according to the opinions of its stakeholders such as the employees. A very coercive organizational culture that inhibits freedom and work flexibility for the employees, more often than not, precipitates irrationality and dissatisfaction amongst the organization’s workforce. This paper is interested with the way Amazon.com treats its employees at the workplace in a bid to achieve business excellence and superior customer service to its customers.

As (Streitfeld and Kantor 2015) explain, Amazon’s organizational bureaucracy is quite stringent with regards to how the management handles its employees. Employees have mainly complained about being forced to work significant hours, harassment by superiors as well as fellow colleagues, and being put under severe pressure Carney (2015). Employees are reminded constantly that they should let go of their mediocre habits that they learned at previous job positions, as said by one of the employees. In other situations, if an employee was unable to find a solution to a problem, there are constant threats that if one is unable to solve the problem they might lose their jobs (Adams 2015). Several analysts such as Tehrani (2014) and Motherboard (2015) attempt to give reasons for this eventuality by saying that in a concerted effort to fulfill the company’s objectives, goals, and mission, and also carry through the demands from the consumers, the organization compels the employees to work really hard and achieve these goals without much consideration for their needs and favorable working conditions. Being the top e-commerce retailer across the globe necessitates hard work, devotion, and full-blown commitment from the company’s management board and employees alike. The pressure and determination to retain this glory and global recognition pushes the management to apply the same pressure onto its employees so as to get things rolling.

The bureaucracy employed at Amazon.com is indeed draconian and dead set for the employees, says Mahapatra (2013); the management rules with an iron fist. However, the rigid working conditions are not badly intended; they are implemented to ensure that the organization maintains its glory and continues to serve its vast clientele base. According to Peltz (2015), Amazon.com enforces the strict culture in a bid to impel the workforce to exceed their limits and give their very best to gratify the customers.

a. The Anytime Feedback Tool

One of the ways that Amazon imposes its power and rigid bureaucracy is in the implementation of the “Anytime Feedback Tool” (Maisto 2013, p. 5). The Anytime Feedback Tool is a mechanism implemented at Amazon.com that provides a platform for the employees to report their own co-workers to their superiors with regards to their work performance and conduct. These reports encompass intensive evaluations by peers which are later handed over to the company’s executive board through an in-house directory during the course of the year. At the end of each year, the directory is reviewed by the management and a list of the best performing and the worst performing is generated. The worst performing staff are done away with in an extremely nerve-wrecking procedure dubbed the “Organizational level Review” (Smith 2015, p. 10) while the best performing are rewarded. Amazon employees do not take this stratagem very nicely as it is considered as a platform to blemish the careers and work progresses of the staff. While the stratagem is intended for employees to maintain a significant level of competition amongst one another, the end results of the tool are perceived very differently and in a negative connotation. The enforcement of the tool causes employees to be brutal towards one another with the sole aim of pleasing what the bosses would want to hear. Other employees do this out of pure malice while others are generally afraid of losing their jobs. This is quite significant to the extent employees are usually instructed to provide secret feedback with their bosses where they go ahead to highlight some of the weaknesses that other employees may have with the sole aim of destroying the other person’s career (Stone 2015).

As Peltz (2015) reveals, the Anytime Feedback Tool has led to random dismissals and in some cases lay-offs within the organization with those who communicate with their supervisors, being able to retain their jobs (Garcia 2016). This tool has been used by employees who at times gang up with the aim of getting a fellow colleague fired or to ensure that they are praised well. If an employee held a grudge with another, he or she would use this channel to point out to managers that the individual is not performing well. In some circumstances, the evaluations provided through the Anytime Feedback were copied into their files that would be used during their Organizational Level Reviews. Managers use the feedback that they have received from various employees, group them into various categories based on their content and then allow employees to know how they were rated. Employees use the anonymity that comes with the Anytime Feedback to at times give inappropriate feedback that may damage an employee’s reputation with the knowledge that it will be used during future reviews (Murray 2015). The company’s unsaid policy of survival for the fittest has led to the employees being unable to develop meaningful relationships with one another as no one can trust what the other has to offer. Employees view each other as competitors as opposed to being team members and although this has led to enhanced productivity from the stiff competition, it eats away on the human aspect of the organizational culture (Carney 2015).

From an employee’s point of view, this system is quite demotivating and leads to low staff morale. An individual may have genuinely given his or her all to the company for a particular period and even obtain hopes from his immediate supervisor that he or she might get a promotion. However, when the managers meet and discuss; the individual might fail to get that promotion at the expense of another employee who is in good terms with the managers. Some employees therefore end up spending significant hours having lunch or coffee with their bosses especially when they know that an OLR is around the corner (Streitfeld and Kantor 2015). This form of organizational politics secludes members of the organization who do not believe in attempting to maintain close relations with their bosses. Additionally, employees have also complained that for an employee to be able to get a promotion, his or her manager must be really persuasive during an OLR. This for Amazon has been evidenced by the fact that new managers are unable to secure promotions for their employees for significant years. This is because they do not have significant power to be able to convince fellow managers that an individual has been able to produce satisfactory results. On the other side, the review creates an environment of tension where employees are just afraid of being fired (D'Orazio 2015). Employees end up forgetting about their own lives at the expense of organizational goals and objectives as the achievement of organizational goals is the only form of job security that they have. This form of organizational culture has rendered many employees unhappy and has led to low employee morale. When employees attempt to complain about this, the attitude they receive is that they either quit or continue working with the present conditions (Murray 2015).

b. Unfavorable working conditions

Cray (2001, p. 6) says that Amazon.com’s working conditions are extremely hostile and disadvantageous to the organization’s employees. Borison (2015) attributes the reason for the unfavorable working conditions is due to the manner with which the CEO, Jeff Bezos, is more task-oriented than people-oriented. Bezos believes that every situation could be handled with the correct facts at hand. This guides him in being able to tell employees on how to behave at the company as well as bluntly confront individuals if things did not go as planned (Bort 2014). His management style is always geared towards ensuring that new employees can adapt to the company’s codified culture and uses it as a guideline on how to carry out work at Amazon, without compromise. This has led to the development of the stringent leadership rules and principles or the acts of faith that outline how an Amazon employee should behave. He has pointed out, several times, that he would not like his organization to be like other top tech companies like Google and Microsoft as he feels as if employees in such organizations are not properly managed (Soper 2012). However, in as much as these policies and management styles is intended to encourage employees to stay with the company for longer periods of time, the aftermath is usually a downside for the firm; these factors have made it hard for Amazon to acquire and retain key staff members since the firm is not willing to provide lavish perks and benefits as well as competitive salary packages (Kantor 2015).

Employees at Amazon are always required to deliver regardless of the division one is in. This means that there is no room for laziness as once performance is constantly being measured and reviewed. Employees end up selling their lives to the organization where they end up knowing nothing outside work. Even while away from the office, Amazon employees have been noted to constantly think about work as a result of the fear that one may lose their job Mahapatra (2013). As Stone and D'Onfro (2015) state, in some instances, family members to employees at Amazon have given testimonies of how they had to go to the organization to plead with their loved ones to come home. This level of hard work and dedication is definitely not good for an individual’s health and has led to individuals resigning from the office to leave a better life.

Employees have been complaining that the work they are given is highly manual and tedious in nature requiring them to input more hours than usual. Employees view this effort of putting in extra hours as a method through which Bezos uses to satisfy or achieve his increasing ambitions for the company (Kantor and Streitfeld 2015). Such employees are said to value that Amazon is a great company however there is a lot of pressure and tension for them at the workplace. Most of the reviews that have been provided in relation to Amazon point out that the company’s employees were generally not happy at the organization. Most employees seem to have an issue with Jeff Bezos management style. The current management style is too bureaucratic and authoritative, say Yarow and Kovach (2011). There are policy charts present in every single department in the firm that dictate the expected behavior and conduct for each employee. The policies are formulated by the senior executives whose administration is unyielding; they do not include the staff to participate in the formulation of these policies or even give their thoughts or feelings. For this reason, Kantor and Streitfeld (2015) describe Amazon.com as an increasingly cold and abstract place to work. He defines Amazon as very bureaucratic in the way the organization rarely considers the human aspect of its employees. Instead, the workforce are only recognized by the tasks they accomplish, which is rather impersonal and leaves the employees feeling unappreciated for the efforts they put into realizing the company’s goals. The organization’s culture is governed by extreme policies that inhibit individual liberty and self-determinism, which at the end of the day, contribute in staff discontent as their creativity and autonomy is rationed.

According to the New York Times, the extreme bureaucracy imposed at Amazon.com is interpreted as abuse by the management (Young 2015). What is worse about this revelation is that even when the employees complain about this, nothing much is done about it. Instead, and shockingly enough, they are told to forward their grievances to the CEO himself who is the proprietor of these hard-lined regulations. The New York Times exposed this hostility in an article published in the year 2015, titled “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace” (Stone and D'Onfro 2015). The article documents how notorious an environment is Amazon.com. The article conducted a thorough interview process where it probed a number of staff personnel working at the organization in an attempt to find out the working conditions. One of the interviewees reported that the working periods are very long and unforgiving as the employees are coerced into working tedious night shifts and also during the holidays without extra pay or any other form of compensation (Stone 2015). The interviewee proceeded to reveal that he had never encountered any personnel from Amazon.com who participates in any other extra-curricular activity or weekend hobbies as this time and space is consumed by the organization. The company attained a grade of 2.7 from a possible score of 5 on a work-life balance rating conducted by Glassdoor (Stone and D'Onfro 2015). When contrasted with Silicon Valley, it was observed that Amazon.com seldom endorses employees to go on holidays and spend quality time with their families as much as Silicon Valley does. Instead, the management pushes for more and more work which it does not compensate for (Young 2015). One such case of overworking its staff is how managers expect the engineers to respond to technical bugs raised by either clients or any other in-house entities. For the managers, it does not matter whether the engineer is off-duty or on weekend vacation; the only thing that matters is that once an issue is raised, the engineer is to attend to this glitch in 20 minutes only. Such errors can be paged as many times as ten, hence the engineers should be prepared to respond to them at any moment he/she is summoned. The micromanagement implemented at the corporation is excessive and is gradually wearing out the employees.

Conclusion

Based on the information presented above, one would question whether Amazon, in general, is a good employer. In my opinion, the company has significant divisions with a wide employee base in various countries. In some divisions, employees have been keen at pointing out that the work at Amazon is quite a lot and, now with the increasing pressure from the management, it is a bit too much to handle. The hasty elimination of employees every year according to the ratings allocated in the Organizational Level Review has brought severe employee turnover rates. One would use the high staff turnover rate at Amazon to point out that it is a bad place to work in.

However, most employees have admitted that the high staff turnover is as a result of the frugality applied at Amazon. From average workstations to benefits that employees consider not to be worthy; employees find it easier to walk away to other reputable organizations that offer better rewards (Stone 2015). In general, I would say that the systems and principles put in place at Amazon were not established to diminish employees but to make them achieve company goals and objectives. The company should however invest in understanding and responding to the needs of their employees. With the rate at which current and former employees are discrediting the company’s human resource management; the company may end up having a tarnished name amidst its success stories. This will be beneficial in reducing their employee turnover rate.











































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