Employee Engagement Strategies for Amazon

This assignment provides a comprehensive analysis of employee engagement strategies for Amazon. It highlights the importance of empowering employees through decision-making, discussing goals, engaging them through social media, and giving them a platform to voice their opinions in open feedback forums. The assignment also recommends implementing these strategies to ensure every Amazonite is motivated, productive, and engaged with the organization.

Running Head: MBA Assignment (HR Practices)
Amazon
MBA Assignment
Culture and Leadership

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Executive Summary
Amazon was founded in the year 1994 by the present visionary of our times Jeff Bezos. Jeff had a
vision to transform the way people shop online; he disrupted the entire ecosystem of e-commerce
and pushed the envelope of customer services. The report here outlines how Amazon has been
engaging its employees at various levels to keep them motivated and ensure they deliver their
objectives. Amazon was under a lot of flak for its HR policies, which were not employee centric. The
year 2015 saw a radical shift in the HR policies of Amazon and it started paying attention to the need
of its employees. The outcome of the process was higher engagement rates with the employees,
increased motivation amongst the employees and sustained profitability for the company.

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Table of Content
Brief Introduction..................................................................................................................................2
Overview of the Organization................................................................................................................3
Identification and Discussion of HR Strategy.........................................................................................3
Evaluation of HR Policies.......................................................................................................................4
Current state of Employee engagement................................................................................................4
Recommendation..................................................................................................................................5
Making employees a part of Decision Making...................................................................................5
Discussing personal goals..................................................................................................................5
Open house discussion and feedback mechanism.............................................................................6
Social Media for Businesses...............................................................................................................6
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................6
References.............................................................................................................................................7

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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 and people management
followed at Amazon.

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Overview of the Organization
Amazon.com is the world’s 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 world’s
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 HR management 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)

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 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 manager’s 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
Amazon’s 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

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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 company’s 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 Amazon’s 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 performance management 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

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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, CXO’s 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

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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.

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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. Seller side HR perspectives during M&A deals: The journey from “intent” to “deal
fruition”. Strategic Direction, 32(6), pp.19-22.
Payne, B.R. and Abegaz, T.T., 2018. Securing the Internet of Things: Best Practices for Deploying IoT
Devices. In Computer and Network Security Essentials (pp. 493-506). Springer, Cham.
Payne, S.C., Mendoza, A.M. and Horner, M.T., 2018. ELECTRONIC PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT. The Brave New World of eHRM 2.0, p.189.
Rossman, J., 2016. The Amazon Way on Iot: 10 Principles for Every Leader from the World's Leading
Internet of Things Strategies (Vol. 2). Clyde Hill Publishing.
Schmidt, J.A., Pohler, D. and Willness, C.R., 2018. Strategic HR system differentiation between jobs:
The effects on firm performance and employee outcomes. Human Resource Management, 57(1),
pp.65-81.
Stelzner, M., 2014. 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report. Social media examiner, pp.1-52.
Sunstein, C.R., 2018. # Republic: Divided democracy in the age of social media. Princeton University
Press.
Thakur, B., 2018. Analysis Of Business To Business E-Commerce. International Journal of Scientific
Research and Management, 6(01).
Valera, M. and Patel, Y., 2018. A Peculiar Sentiment Analysis Advancement in Big Data. In Journal of
Physics: Conference Series (Vol. 933, No. 1, p. 012015). IOP Publishing.