7024MHR HR Challenge Assignment Sample

Module code and Title: 7024MHR HR Challenge Assignment Sample

Introduction

Communication is the most important part of an HR department, and it is a two-way process that involves the top management to the employees at the bottom for the execution of the plans (Kantor et. al. 2021). Similarly, HR has to take the questions from the employees to the top management. Effective Communication holds the key to success for an organization. The present report is about the Challenges faced by HR in the multinational online retailer and web service provider Amazon, founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos.

It is known for its wide range of products, with a revenue for the quarter ending of 2022 was 127.101 billion dollars, an increase of 14.7%. This report covers the challenges the HR department of Amazon is facing. Furthermore, considering the same, an evaluation and discussion in regard to its preparedness for the future are analyzed. Furthermore, towards the end of the study, several ideas and recommendations for strategic business and effective organizational outputs are discussed widely.

Main Body

HR Challenge (Part-1)

Amazon HR Challenge: Analysis of ineffective Communication and its impacts at Amazon

The growth of digital transformation has added more problems for human resource management. This makes it difficult for the HR job that is faced with many challenges. So identifying and overcoming challenges for HR involves money, time, and effort to a great extent (Boewe and Schulten, 2017).

As a company very well know that the employees are the biggest assets of any organization. Thus, maintenance of Communication is one of the key factors that play a great role while dealing with employees. One such major issue can be taken into consideration in regard to Amazon. The said organization is facing this Human Resource issue of Communication within its organization that has caused major impacts on the organization’s position, growth, and reputation.

It was reported that Amazon had made incorrect calculations in its payment to the workers on paid medical and parental leave for almost 2 years. The Times report stated, “only one strand in a longstanding knot of problems with Amazon’s system for handling unpaid and paid leaves.” Workers across the globe facing medical problems and other life crises were fired when system, by mistake, marked them as a no-show (Tambe et. al. 2019).

At a time when the organization cannot afford to lose its employees, the negligence of both line managers and HR staff is well aware of the intricacies of leave policies and the impact they can have on employee retention and company performance.

Lack of Communication with Amazon makes it hard for the employees to adapt to organizational change. Change within an organization is natural as it affects almost everything, like its environment, competitors, customers, and workshop (Onyusheva and Seenalasataporn, 2018).

But with the lack of Communication, any unknown change brings the feeling of anxiety and uncertainty, whether it’s managerial, structural, procedural, or technological, within the employees of Amazon. This is a big responsibility for the employees to adapt to the new changes, and it becomes the most difficult challenge for Amazon’s HR.

Furthermore, due to a lack of proper internal Communication, the performance of all the teams is not the same, as it depends mostly on the team leaders and their communication strategies while dealing with the employees. Due to this issue, many workers of Amazon have to leave their job because they lack a good relationship with their managers (Lorne and Gogireddy, 2021). This also creates an issue with many employees as they leave their job because of a lack of future growth in the present organization. The prime reason here is the lack of Communication with the employees in regard to their development opportunities.

Furthermore, Amazon faces the challenge of a diversity of employees with different ideas, perspectives, and experiences due to their lack of effective Communication with the employees. Thus, this is a new challenge for Amazon to manage workers from different cultures in a local team.

Improvements

Thus, by noting Amazon’s HR challenges and impacts in regard to Communication, it can be noted that with the ever-changing business styles, HR has become the main focus of the organizations (Rezwan, 2021). Moreover, as employees are the most important asset to any company for its growth and sustainability, Human Resources plays an important part in improving and solving the challenges faced by the company. Some of the areas where Amazon’s HR has to work are discussed below:

• The HR should focus on the implementation of the 7C’s of Communication within the organization. There should be clarity in the Communication; the HR should concisely convey the message, and the message should be precise and correct (Wells al. 2018). Amazon HR should communicate with its workers directly rather than by mail, with a long, complicated waiting list that comes in thousands per day.
• Training should be given at regular intervals to make Communication efficient, clear, concise, and understandable and prevent the employees from overloading.
• Amazon’s HR has to create a team and appoint team leaders with efficient communication skills, making everyone comfortable to work and avoiding conflicts within the organization.
• The HR team of Amazon should communicate effectively with the employees and ensure that they are happy and satisfied with the work culture and the workplace of Amazon, as it will be easy to retain them (Ives al. 2019).
• Also, Amazon’s HR should ensure proper Communication in regard to compensation and benefits of the employees. The employees of Amazon face several issues due to salary deductions without due notice of the same. Thus, proper Communication in regard to compensation and Amazon’s employee benefits should be informed to employees.
• HR should effectively communicate in regard to the change management in the organization, as change is unavoidable in today’s world. Thus, any company such as Amazon must predict and communicate change (Hanley and Hubbard, 2020). Each employee takes a different time to come to terms with any change. That is why it is essential to communicate transparently and clearly need and benefit of change.
• HR of Amazon should focus on diversity-based communication issues and set organizational values or standards of behavior in the workplace. This will help the employees understand their role, conduct, and behavior while dealing with other employees, irrespective of their culture and background. Thus, it should create a culture that is welcoming.
• Effective Leadership and leadership skills development is another effective improvement strategy that the HR of Amazon can adopt. Leadership training, mentoring, and progression planning should be important at Amazon to avoid conflicts.
• Communication of a simple and strong performance framework is very essential as the performance indicator need not be difficult for an employee to understand and should be linked to their job role (Rikap, 2022). So that the worker directly relates performance to the target set for him and can see his contribution to the achievement of the company.

Part B

Employment Participation Challenge

A lack of employee engagement at Amazon

Like many other global companies, Amazon has also experienced its share of criticism regarding its labor practices. This company has a bad reputation for having high demands, low pay, and average stability in the job. Though the company’s turnover is very high, employee satisfaction rate is very low (Pisano, 2019). The New York Times recently reported the unpleasant working condition of white-collar workers at Amazon.

Report also noted that the new entrants are encouraged to work for long hours and damage co-workers through criticism. Facing this criticism, Amazon has designed a program to enhance employee engagement and satisfaction, which is already used in some warehouses.

And it is also introduced in their corporate offices. This system secretly collects information from the workers before it is presented and organized to the management. But the critics complained that it is more inclusive than feedback program for warehouse workers (Dixit et. al. 2019). However, good and honest results are required for success and positive employee engagement.

Research shows that for sales growth as well as employee growth, employee engagement is a key element. Employee engagement decreases accidents by 50% and defects by 40%. And the surprising part is in high pressure; the turnover rates are reduced by 70% (Brevini and Swiatek, 2020). When the workers are emotionally attached to their work and feel passionate about it, their enthusiasm and creativity become standard mechanisms of the firm.

Though this highly published engagement issue of Amazon is common within the world of business, many of company’s top management take employee engagement for granted, leading them to treat their customer similarly. Therefore, the top management should set an example by sharing and creating the employee engagement strategy with workers and the public (Opitz et. al. 2018). But the management should not limit its funding to support workers engagement efforts and should follow ideas to raise engagement of employees.

Employee engagement surveys need to be reported accurately, and all the questions asked should be related to actionable answers and recommendations. In this context, it needs to be properly designed to highlight the drawbacks and identify where improvement can be done. However, it can be improved by increasing interaction with the management also.

Therefore, the management should be trained and able to develop and understand a relationship of professionalism with its workers (Chi and Chen, 2021). Management should determine individual weaknesses and strengths for career development at the end. The employee should be empowered, challenged, and engaged. The employees want to be heard and want their feedback looked upon.

Amazon’s employee engagement is also a matter of concern for investors. In a recent shareholders meeting, they pressurized Bezos and other Amazon top officials about the treatment of its employees. They were questioned regarding risk to the firm’s reputation (Baboolal-Frank, 2021). On the eve of this meeting, CTW Investment Group, company which works with union-sponsored pension funds with 900,000 Amazon shares, summoned hundreds of shareholders to hear directly from warehouse workers.

Workforce Processes challenge

Amazon faces recruitment and retention challenges

Amazon is trying hard to attract and retain its workers as it faces tough competition for workers due to labor backlash, inflation, and other reasons. Amazon can retain its top position in the market depending on organizations ability to retain and recruit skilled workers, including those for high-tech roles like software engineers (Sandeep and Pohutezhini, 2019). It is also facing issues in its corporate culture and compensation practices.” Amazon has bad reputation for terminating its workers both in warehouses and corporate, and its compensation packages are less attractive than its competitors.

Amazon is the only company in America currently facing hiring and retaining challenges. According to a recent survey, it is stated that from May to June this year, 69%of respondents stated high competition for workers as main cause for the difficulty in hiring. Survey also shows that 41% of applicants lack the necessary skills, while the other 30% said pay and benefits are a problem with Amazon (Stein et. al. 2021).

Amazon has joined other companies to increase salaries, bonuses, and other perks. The chosen company is going through a change in its behavior regarding employees. It has recently doubled the salary for corporate and tech employees; competitive pressures have led Amazon to keep its lower-wage workers happy.

Some of the reasons for this problem are discussed below:

‘Relentless’ culture – An increase in pay can only retain the employees, but if they are overworked, it will not last long. Some employees who left firm during the pandemic described work culture at Amazon as “absolutely relentless” and difficult for families to sustain (Malik et. al. 2022). The workload at Amazon is too much for its employees, so even when they are getting paid well, they prefer to change to a company that has fewer working hours.

“Workload was overwhelming, and even if one works hard, it is never sufficient,” this was stated by the former corporate Amazon employee: Market Intelligence. A former employee confirmed that he left the job for another organization because they offered more money and fewer working hours.

War for talent – There is a huge market for hiring in cloud services, which has become a “huge war for talent.” Though Microsoft and Google have announced their plan to slow their hiring, Amazon needs to have it going by hiring thousands of workers to start new cloud services (Kim and Scott, 2019). The challenges of retaining its employees are seen in its effort to form unions. Amazon web services have been hiring at fast rate than Microsoft Corp, with 24,460 job openings for AWS till mid of September, while in contrast, Microsoft has hired 2,058 openings and Google cloud has 1,004 till mid-September.

Action Plan:

Effective Implementation of the Actions

In order to achieve Strategic Business Objectives and improve the Organizational Effectiveness of Amazon, the following implementation-based key aspects are to be taken into consideration:

• Formulating and implementing an effective communication Strategy – The major issue faced by Amazon is its communication problem with the employees, they have applied the method of writing emails to HR to discuss their issues, but since there are thousands of mails coming every day, it is not possible to go through it in a limited time frame (Kantor et. al. 2021). So, they should appoint team and team leaders who can discuss their issues with the HR department directly and find a solution in a limited time. And by the implementation of the 7C’s of communication, it will be easier for the organization as well as the employees to communicate in a more transparent manner. Again, the leaders chosen should be properly trained so that they will be able to explain all the details about salary, benefits, and compensation in a more clear way.
• Engaging the Employees – the Company has a very bad reputation in the market regarding its treatment of the employees, wages, compensation, and long working hours. The organization should engage its workers in a more personalized manner; if the employees are happy, then the production level is high, and so also the revenue of the company (Boewe and Schulten, 2017). Increasing salaries, bonuses and easy-to-get leave policies can help employee engagement by creating and sharing the employee engagement strategy with the workers, doing regular surveys and putting accurate reports before the management to get answers and listen to their recommendations.
• Employee retention and recruitment strategy development – The concerned company is known for terminating its employers both in corporate and warehouse. And workers are also reluctant to join Amazon, knowing its negative impression in the market. Even if it increases the salary of its employees, workers don’t stay in the job for long as it has long working hours (Tambe et. al. 2019 ). They get overburdened in comparison to what they get. It can get better by increasing the salary, extra perks, fewer working hours, easy policies for leaves, and a changed behavior toward its employees can solve the issue. Despite everything, Amazon is hiring the maximum in the market compared to its competitors.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that Human Resources is essential for each organization as it plays a key role within the firm and its operations. It helps not only develop strategies but also opts out effective ways for its implementation for the benefit of its employees and the growth of the organization. The lack of efficient communication stands as a major HR issue at Amazon, which affects the employees and the company’s growth as well.

Moreover, challenges of effective employee engagement, retention, and other workforce processes challenges are another hurdle in the path of the organization which needs to be resolved by the suggested actions. These actions stated, such as training, model implementation, retention strategies, leadership development, and other suggested actions, involve various useful implementation strategies which, if adopted wisely by the said firm, will prove to be highly beneficial for them.

References

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Boewe, J. and Schulten, J., (2017). The long struggle of the Amazon employees. Rosa Luxemburg-Stiftung, Brussels.

Brevini, B. and Swiatek, L., (2020). Amazon: Understanding a Global Communication Giant. Routledge.

Chi, W. and Chen, Y., (2021). Employee satisfaction and the cost of corporate borrowing. Finance Research Letters, 40, p.101666.

Covella, G., McCarthy, V., Kaifi, B. and Cocoran, D., (2017). Leadership’s role in employee retention. Business Management Dynamics, 7(5), pp.1-15.

Dixit, A., Clouse, C. and Turken, N., (2019). Strategic business location decisions: Importance of economic factors and place image. Rutgers Business Review, 4(1).

Hanley, D. and Hubbard, S., (2020). Eyes Everywhere: Amazon’s Surveillance Infrastructure and Revitalizing Worker Power. Open Markets Institute.

Hyland, P., Caputo, A.W. and Reeves, D., (2018). Understanding new era workplace relationships: Insights from employee engagement research. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 11(3), pp.523-530.

Ives, B., Cossick, K. and Adams, D., (2019). Amazon Go: disrupting retail?. Journal of Information Technology Teaching Cases, 9(1), pp.2-12.

Kantor, J., Weise, K. and Ashford, G., (2021). The Amazon that customers don’t see. The New York Times, 15.

Kim, H. and Scott, C., (2019). Change communication and the use of anonymous social media at work: Implications for employee engagement. Corporate Communications: An International Journal.

Lee, C.C., Lim, H.S., Seo, D.J. and Kwak, D.H.A., (2022), April. Examining employee retention and motivation: the moderating effect of employee generation. In Evidence-based HRM: a Global Forum for Empirical Scholarship (No. ahead-of-print). Emerald Publishing Limited.

Lee, C.C., Quattropani, J., Seo, D. and Lim, H.S., (2021). The Moderating effects of employee generation on workplace retention during the Covid-19 pandemic. QRBD, 8, pp.41-58.

Lorne, F.T. and Gogireddy, M.R., (2021), March. Digital social contracts with AI robots: some implications for Amazon. Com. In European, Asian, Middle Eastern, North African Conference on Management & Information Systems (pp. 78-89). Springer, Cham.

Malik, A., Thevisuthan, P. and De Sliva, T., (2022). Artificial Intelligence, Employee Engagement, Experience, and HRM. In Strategic Human Resource Management and Employment Relations (pp. 171-184). Springer, Cham.

Onyusheva, I. and Seenalasataporn, T., (2018). Strategic analysis of global e-commerce and diversification technology: the case of amazon. com inc. The EUrASEANs: journal on global socio-economic dynamics, (1 (8)), pp.48-63.

Opitz, M., Chaudhri, V. and Wang, Y., (2018). Employee social-mediated crisis communication as opportunity or threat?. Corporate Communications: An International Journal.

Pisano, G.P., (2019). The hard truth about innovative. Harvard Business Review, 97(1), pp.62-71.

Rezwan, R.B., (2021). Managing Human Resources in E-Commerce. In Cross-Border E-Commerce Marketing and Management (pp. 229-256). IGI Global.

Rikap, C., (2022). Amazon: A story of accumulation through intellectual rentiership and predation. Competition & Change, 26(3-4), pp.436-466.

Sandeep, V. and Pohutezhini, B., (2019). The e-commerce revolution of amazon. com. Splint International Journal of Professionals, 6(4), pp.33-39.

Stein, D., Hobson, N., Jachimowicz, J.M. and Williams, A., (2021). How companies can improve employee engagement right now. Harvard Business Review.

Tambe, P., Cappelli, P. and Yakubovich, V., (2019). Artificial intelligence in human resources management: Challenges and a path forward. California Management Review, 61(4), pp.15-42.

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