Amazon's Change Management: Improving Work Environment & Customer Care

This report provides an analysis of a proposed organisational change project within Amazon Australia, focusing on improving both employee satisfaction and customer care. The report identifies issues with the current open office plan, leading to employee dissatisfaction due to noise and lack of privacy, and proposes a return to individual or departmental cabins. Additionally, it addresses the inefficiencies in the customer care system, where customers face difficulties connecting and expressing their issues, proposing the implementation of an AI-powered system to streamline query handling and improve customer satisfaction. The report also discusses potential barriers to these changes, such as management resistance due to costs and employee concerns, and identifies change agents who can influence the successful implementation of these strategies, highlighting the need for investment and training to overcome these challenges. The goal is to improve overall organisational performance by addressing these key areas of concern.

Organisational Change Project
A study on Amazon

Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Description of the organisation........................................................................................................3
Outcome/s expected from this change project.................................................................................3
Current reality and the underlying reasons......................................................................................4
The gap between current reality and expected outcome/s...............................................................5
Description and details of the proposed change..............................................................................6
Resistance to or other barriers for change.......................................................................................6
Identification of the change agents and assessment of their willingness.........................................7
Feasibility and implications of the change, both positive and negative, considering evaluation of
the effectiveness of the post-change organization...........................................................................9
Overview of change theories...........................................................................................................9
Conclusion.....................................................................................................................................10
References......................................................................................................................................10
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Introduction
Organisational change is a crucial factor which makes a huge impact on the growth of a business
organisation. A company goes through a number of changes before it succeeds in leaving a mark
in the business industry (Matos Marques Simoes & Esposito, 2014). These changes are not
always positively effective; change management can turn out to be negative at times. An
ineffective change management can be disastrous for a company, making negative impact on its
reputation as well as workforce; whereas implementation of effective change management can
result in an upgraded organisational performance (Al-Haddad & Kotnour, 2015). In this report,
the required changes in Amazon will be discussed briefly.
Description of the organisation
Amazon is a renowned company having its outlets in almost every developed and developing
country around the globe. Ever since its launch in 1995, Amazon has undergone a lot of changes
to develop as one of the biggest e-commerce sites in the world. Based in Seattle, Amazon only
sold books in the initial years. It took numerous change theories and strategies for Amazon to
climb up to such a prestigious position. From selling only a particular type of product category
i.e. books, to selling more than 200 million products to the customers, Amazon has come a long
way (Van der Voet, Groeneveld & Kuipers, 2014). Despite of all these changes Amazon is
facing certain issues related to office environment and customer care. Amazon is making
outstanding progress in the other sections, but they are yet to strengthen their customer care
support system. Also, as termed by many employees, the office environment needs to undergo a
set of changes to create the proper work ambience.
Outcome/s expected from this change project
The change project is aiming to improve the work ambience by withdrawing the open office plan
of Amazon and providing every department and significant employee or group of employees
their personal cabin. For past few years Amazon is following their open office plan in Australia,
hence all the employees are working in a gigantic room. The motivation behind this
implementation was assumed to be the improving employee relations and make all the
employees aware about different operations within the organisation. But this idea is causing
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hindrances for most of the employees and they are expressing their dissatisfaction over it. It is
expected that removal of open office plan will improve employee satisfaction level, therefore,
increasing their effectiveness in the organisational functions.
Another weak part of Amazon Australia is their poorly handled customer care system (Van der
Voet, 2014). In accordance to the survey completed by customers of Amazon in Australia, it has
been found that most of the customers are having serious complaints against the customer care
executives. Therefore, customers are finding it hard to get their queries answered or their
problems solved. In such a scenario, the company is introducing an AI powered customer care
system which will act as a medium between customer care executives and the agitated or upset
customers. This way, the company is expecting to see a reduction in the dissatisfaction level
among the customers. Hence, both the changes are expected to improve the satisfaction level of
the employees and the customers as well, in a different way.
Current reality and the underlying reasons
Currently the Australia office of Amazon is doing well, but has serious concerns regarding to
work environment and customer care segment. Firstly, the work environment should be
discussed. Two years prior, the company implemented open office plan for its Australia based
office to meet certain goals. Being a huge company with numerous employees and a vast number
of offices around the globe, Amazon has employees belonging from different religious and
cultural backgrounds. As different communities has different culture and way of talking,
employees having different cultural backgrounds often find it hard to get mixed up with the local
workforce (Belias & Koustelios, 2014). So the company implemented open office plan to bring
employees closer and improve their relations in order to eliminate unnecessary conflicts.
Although, with time, company as well as employees became aware of intercultural
communication skills, that problem with communication is almost sorted. Hence the open office
plan is of no use now, in the previous context. However, the open office plan is experiencing
new trouble as employees are facing issues like noisy work environment, lack of privacy etc.
Working in a single room is never easy for the employees of a company as huge as Amazon. The
employees are unable to concentrate on their work due to noises and also facing problems while
making official phone calls peacefully. Lack of privacy is creating hindrances as the act by other
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employees can be disturbing at times while handling important work. So, this open office plan is
giving negative outcome only, as the primary reason behind it has become obsolete. Also, the
customer care executives are unable to deliver proper support to the customers. The reason is
misunderstanding; either the customers are not able to explain their issues properly as they are
saying that the customer care number takes at least 10-12 attempts to get connected. Until then
the customer has already lost his/her cool. Hence, it becomes difficult for the customer care
executives to understand the problem faced by the customers. Customers are expecting a system
or a method through which they will be able to register their complaints in first or second
attempt.
The gap between current reality and expected outcome/s
The current condition of the Amazon office of Australia and the expected outcome of the above
discussed organisational changes has a wide gap in between. In the context of the work
environment structure, the current reality suggests that the company should revise the setup of
their office as the employees are being affected by their open office plan. Employees are finding
it hard to concentrate on their work and also phone calls made by other employees are creating
hindrances the jobs assigned to an employee. Although open office plan was implemented 2
years back, the problem is increasing day by day. The noise level inside the office is increasing
gradually with more amounts of hindrances within the organisation. The expected outcome of the
new change in this field should provide the employees with a peaceful space to work and deliver
better results. Also, employee satisfaction level is expected to rise up.
Secondly, the focus is on the customer care sector of Amazon Australia. As the current condition
suggests, the customers facing issues with the product or service are finding it hard to convey
their problem in a seamless manner to the customer care executives. Customers are said to make
10-12 attempts before getting a customer care executive on line. And then when the customers
are supposed to keep calm and explain their issue, they lose their cool and customer care
executives face the wrath of an agitated and irritated customer. Being such a huge company,
Amazon should be more focused about their dealings with customers. Customer care executives
are to be categorised to handle queries having similar type of issue (Sykes, 2015). For example,
few customer care executives dedicated to handle only issues related to ‘delay in delivery’ or
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‘damaged item’ vice versa. An AI powered system will be implemented to accept all the
customer queries and forward it to the customer care executives handling respective category of
problem. The expected outcome is improving customer satisfaction level and making customer
care executives more effective.
Description and details of the proposed change
There will be two types of proposed changes exploring two most significant aspects of an
organisation. One is related to employee satisfaction and the other one related to customer
satisfaction. The change related to first segment will be revising the open office plan and
providing specific employee, group of employees and each department with their personal
cabins. For that the entire structure of the Amazon office in Australia is required to be changed.
Small cubicles should be removed and separate rooms should be made in accordance to the
capacity of each department and also importance of specific employees or group of employees.
The change in the second segment will be implementation of an AI powered customer care
system which will be able to collect all the queries of the customers made by phone calls, sort
those issues according to their type and then forward those issues to the customer care executives
dealing with respective problems. For that the company has adopt advanced technology and
provide employees with sufficient knowledge so that they are able to use the new system
accordingly (Lewis, Passmore & Cantore, 2016). The first change can be time-consuming and
expensive. Again, the second change will be requiring a good flow of investment to make it
successful. It can be seen that both the new changes require a good investment from the
company.
Resistance to or other barriers for change
The Amazon office in Australia requires the above discussed changes and this is a task which is
bound to face certain barriers. The barriers can be formed from the side of organisation, or the
employees or other stakeholders of the company (Kuipers et al. 2014). In this proposed changed
management, a number of barriers are there to implement the same in organisational context. For
the first change regarding the withdrawal of open office plan in the office environment, the
primary barrier can come from the side of the management. The management might suggest
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some other cost effective way to handle the rising employee dissatisfaction, as changing the
structure of office interior is a costly method the management is most likely to skip this
expenditure. Also, this being a time consuming process, the work might be hampered making a
negative impact on the work progress. Thus, management might want to skip this change in
order to keep the pace of work intact. There is a possibility that some of the employees may have
issues with this change; although open office plan became ineffective, some of the employees
liked this pattern of office interiors. They can raise an issue regarding this change management.
Again, the other change regarding the customer care system of the company will be facing
certain barriers during implementation. Adoption of advanced technology requires huge sum of
money to be invested upon, also to handle an advanced technology, certain knowledge is
required (Lozano, Nummert & Ceulemans, 2016). That implies, employees should be provided
with relevant learning opportunities or trainings. This accounts for further investment. Thus,
management might raise objections regarding this plan. Also, the infrastructure of that particular
office has to be capable enough to handle such a significant change in the field of technology
(Geppert, Matten & Williams, 2016).
Identification of the change agents and assessment of their willingness
The change management program in the context of the Amazon office in Australia has several
change agents influencing the proposed changes. The change agents, who influences or initiates
the changes inside an organisation, are of two types; internal change agents and external change
agents (Doppelt, 2017). External change agents do not belong to the company, whereas internal
change agents are directly linked to the company (Cameron & Green, 2015). In this scenario of
Amazon, external change agents are consultants providing new profitable strategies to the
company, and internal change agents are the managers who are usually inspired by the external
change agents. The two strategies discussed in the report should get a positive nod from the
external change agents. The managers i.e. internal change agents might raise questions regarding
the proposed changes as they are supposed to provide top management with satisfying statistics
of the company to get approval for the proposed changes (Hwi-Jung et al. 2017). Willingness of
the external change agents is clear as the changes are meant to harvest increased revenue in
future. However, there is possibility that the internal change agents might skip this process
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fearing the risk factor involved with it, that is, higher investment. The change intervention table
is below:
Sections Answers
Underlying idea The proposed change is expected to see a rise in the
annual revenue; with higher customer satisfaction
level and employee satisfaction level through the
implementation of AI powered customer care
system and withdrawal of open office plan.
Description The change in office environment will be arriving
with removal of open office plan and provision of
personal cabins to specific employees, group of
employees and particular departments. The change
in customer care system will see a new AI powered
system to gather all the customer queries,
categorise those and send it to respective customer
care executives to handle it accordingly.
Comments Both the changes might be costly, but
implementation of both in current organisational
operations will be beneficial for Amazon Australia
in long run.
Role and contributions of the interventionist The interventionist should present the proposed
change management plans to top management and
make them aware about the positive changes it will
be bringing (Smollan, 2015). If the plans are
approved by the management, the relevant
proceedings related to the implementation of the
changes should take place under the observation of
interventionist.
Change level The successful implementation of the proposed
changes is bound to take the organisation to a new
high.
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Feasibility and implications of the change, both positive and negative,
considering evaluation of the effectiveness of the post-change organization
The proposed changes are carrying certain implications along with them, both positive and
negative (Gollenia, 2016). If the changes, which are discussed above, are successfully
implemented in the business operations of Amazon, it will be proven highly beneficial for the
company in the long run. As a change comes with advantages as well as risk factors, it is
important for Amazon Australia to work closely to curb the chances of negative outcomes as
much as possible through well-defined preventive measures. In this case, knowledge about AI
powered system should be provided to the customer care executives to avoid errands and acquire
desired outcome.
Overview of change theories
There are a number of change theories to tackle change management within an organisation. On
the basis of the current situation, Lewin’s Change Model would be appropriate. The Change
Model of Lewin is having three stages of change management, which are, unfreeze, change, and
refreeze (Hayes, 2018). In the first stage, it is required to unfreeze the current systems, study it
and analyse it thoroughly to determine what should be changed to make the system more
productive (Cummings, Bridgman & Brown, 2016). In second stage, the change is implemented
by following proper methods. In the last stage, the new system experiences a refreeze, which
seals all its attributes for a certain time period (Kaufman, 2017). As a renowned company like
Amazon requires in-depth analysis and improvements, Lewin’s Change Model is the most
relevant change theory for the company.
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Conclusion
Change is a continuous and inevitable process in order to survive the volatile and competitive
global economy (Krüger, 2018). Change makes a company capable for adapting to different
organisational situations (Teal et al. 2015). In this report, the required changes for Amazon
Australia are stated, along with supportive statements and reasons. Such a huge organisation like
Amazon needs to go through a lot of procedures to implement a change in their system. It is
expected that the suggested changes in this report will be beneficial for the company. Therefore,
it is understood that irrespective of the company size, change is required for all the business
organisations.
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