Amazon poor working culture
Amazon relies on its enormous economic and technological resources to segment the needs of its consumers. Hence, enabling the company to market directly to a defined group or niche in the market. Overall, Amazon targets upper and middle-class consumers with the capability to shop online (Singh & Pathak, 2021). Amazon employs a consumer-centric strategy that helps the company position itself as a low-cost, convenient, and comprehensive selection of products and services to target its consumers. Despite such tremendous growth and influence in the business environment. Amazon has been increasingly criticised for its toxic work culture. Although Amazon has millions of consumers, life within its corporate offices is virtually unknown. Even low-level staff are forced to sign a long nondisclosure agreement.
Such practices have contributed to Amazon being labelled as the “Walmart of internet”. Amazon’s working circumstances are defined by total control on workers’ every move, as well as a lack of contract stability. Nevertheless, business experts suggest that the employment practices are not unlawful, they have the potential to have a negative impact on employees, the surrounding community, and how we think about a safe and humane workplace (Tritt & Teschner, 2019). The consumer focused philosophy underpinning Amazon’s success has force the company to neglect the need is and interest of other important stakeholders, especially the employees. In recent years there have been exposes and reporting on the toxic and poor working environment subjected to Amazon employees.
Essentially, it is a common practice among Amazon employees to criticise each other when engaging in office. Furthermore, an increasing number of current and past Amazon employees state that the company required them to work for lengthy period to meet customer deadlines or demands. Such practices by have been viewed by expert as biase and discriminatory, especially when it emanates from an established company like Amazon.
In recent years there have been public research and articles that examine the negative work culture associated with Amazon. For instance, The New York Times cite the experiences of Amazon employee who exited the company due to unconducive work environment (Matthews, Harbin & Daigle, 2018). The former employee who worked in book promotion for less than two years and said his enduring memory was witnessing people cry in the workplace, a sight that other employees described as well. Such practices elaborate the toxic work environment a majority of Amazon workers are subjected to despite the reputable perspective towards the customers.
Why the problem persist
Since its inception, Amazon Company has been viewed with a positive outlook. More so, the rise and growth of Amazon resonates with the ideal of American values embedded in the American dream. Amazon growth has enabled the company to provide employment opportunities to many low income American while providing quality services to most of its consumers in the western societies, especially the United States. For example, xxx mentions that once the former president Barack Obama has commended Amazon for delivering “middle-class jobs” with fair pay and benefits, but this is a mischaracterization. The average hourly wage in an Amazon fulfillment centre is eleven dollar an hour compared to the government minimum wage of seven dollars an hour.
Strategic approach to solve the problem
The problem can be solved by developing a holistic strategy that can be useful in eliminating much of the problem facing Amazon employees. This section will provide a step-by-step strategy, which can be used to implement new changes in Amazon as a means to eliminate the toxic work environment and culture.
Business experts suggest that collecting inputs should be the first step in strategy development. Ideally, Amazon managers can utilise various methods/ approaches to collect the desired input (Jovanov & Temjanovski, 2019). The most notable is the CATWOE- it is an assessment tool commonly used to examine the input or output of a firm’s stakeholders. CATWOE consist of key construct that include Owners, Worldview, Transformation, Environment, Actor, And Customer. This methods is suitable in understanding the needs of specific stakeholders’ regarding specific issues affecting the company like employees. Thus Amazon management can conduct a CARWOE assessment to assess the views of the employees in the prevailing culture *Rachmayanti & Arumsari, 2021).
The next step involves in developing the strategy to eliminate the prevailing problem at amazon involves outlining the values of the organizations. Norms and values are vied as the core “DNA” of any successful firm. This means that Amazon management need to understand on what values are important in creating a positive culture and working environment. This means defining the specific cultural norms and ethics that will enable the company shift from its toxic and exploitative employee environment. The contemporary society demands that large corporations such as Amazon need to demonstrate high level of diversity, inclusivity, and tolerance not just to consumers but employees and other stakeholders. Such perception will prompt Amazon managers to concentrate in addressing the toxic work culture present in the company by providing inclusive and tolerance workspace. That caters to the needs of each employee irrespective of their qualification, background, and sexuality, among others.
The proceeding step requires outlining the objective and goals of the new culture to be adopted in Amazon. Ideally, goals are based on specific objectives, which a company can attain. It highlight on the essential areas that interest the company to pursue profit making ventures. Notably, because Amazon seeks to make significant change in specific issue that is fundamental to the success of the company- culture. Thus the proposed strategy development will not include diverse forms of objective, but a singular goal that aims to eradicate a toxic work environment at Amazon. Nonetheless, it is critical for the objective to be properly stated and communicated form the top executive to junior employees. The move will be important in enabling Amazon managers to familiarise themselves towards adopting and practicing a tolerant and inclusive culture, which is not toxic.
A successful adoption and implementation of the proposed goals or objective is based on assessing the application and practicality of the proposed strategy. To achieve this, the managers are required to outline the main employees who will be mandated with specific functional departments in Amazon responsible for introducing and overseeing the new culture is integrated in the company. This means that Amazon management will need to highlight of performance metric that can be used to measure how effective a new culture has been adopted based on established plans. These metric can be prepared based on the Key Performance Indicator Models that focus on organizational structure and culture. There are numerous metric which can be used to ascertain if the newly introduce culture is effective at Amazon. They include assessing employee satisfaction, retention levels, and employee motivation among others.
The proceeding section in strategy development process will require defining the communication process/ plan. Essentially, it is imperative the management at Amazon to detail how, when, and to who the information is going to be transmitted or shared. Such communication is important in a company that aims to change its culture by ensuring that each employee irrespective of their position understand their responsibility in applying new cultural changes. Coherently, there is a wide variety of tools, which can be used by Amazon managers to ensure that the proposed strategy is effectively communicated to various teams in the company.
Nevertheless, the process of developing a business strategy can experience numerous challenges or difficulties. For instance, poor communication to lack of concrete communication plan with the proposed strategy. The failure to communicate effectively can negatively affect the implementation and successful adoption of the proposed plans. Therefore, it is important for the Amazon managers of the to familiarise themselves with these types of challenges common when developing when adopting the above discussed strategy aimed at eliminating biases and toxic work environment, this will ensure that the strategy will ensure proper transition of recommended culture while reducing the probability of the problem re-occurring in the future. This is consistent with the dictates of the organizational culture theory, which posit that a firm’s beliefs, shared values, ethics, and customs can be developed over a period of time (Lubis & Hanum, 2020).
Reference
Jovanov, T., & Temjanovski, R. (2019). Tools for assessment of strategic business units in the marketing activities of companies. Macedonian International Journal of Marketing, 5(9), 36-44.
Lubis, F. R., & Hanum, F. (2020, December). Organizational culture. In 2nd Yogyakarta international conference on educational management/administration and pedagogy (YICEMAP 2019). Atlantis Press (pp. 88-91).
Matthews, B. L., Harbin, J., & Daigle, J. (2018). The New York Times Versus Amazon: Is Jeff Bezos’ head still in the clouds?. Journal of Organizational Psychology, 18(3).
Rachmayanti, W., & Arumsari, P. (2021, July). Risk factors analysis affecting project time delay in construction projects using CATWOE analysis. In IOP Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science (Vol. 794, No. 1, p. 012010). IOP Publishing.
Singh, A., & Pathak, G. S. (2021). Revisiting marketing strategy in emerging markets: a study of Amazon. com Inc. International Journal of Economics and Business Research, 22(2-3), 113-126.
Tritt, L. F., & Teschner, R. S. (2019). Amazon Delivers Diversity: Geographical & Social Influences on Corporate Embeddedness. Berkeley Bus. LJ, 16, 1.
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