M5 Assignment 2: LASA 2 Assignment—Workforce 2020 Executive Report
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Workforce 2020 Executive Report
Marquita Watkins
B6027 | Perspectives in Change Leadership
Argosy University - Online
October 3, 2018
Workforce 2020 Executive Report
Jeff Bezos started Amazon.com, Inc commonly referred to as Amazon on fifth of July in the year 1994. It is an American cloud computing and E-commerce company. Amazon is in the online shopping industry. The company sells a variety of products including media (videotapes, books, music CDs and DVDs), baby, apparel, beauty products, electronics, food and groceries, scientific and industrial supplies, healthcare items, musical instruments, automotive parts, sporting items and jewelry among other items. Users can buy and sell goods through the company’s online marketplace structure. Amazon is the leading online retailer in the world and a popular cloud services supplier through AWS, EC2, and S3. The company's headquarters are in Seattle, Washington although it has customer service, fulfillment, and software development centers around the world (Amazon & E. C. 2015).
Amazon has various employee motivation methods. Among them is the Amazon Career Choice program, which seeks to benefit workers willing to go back to school. The program pre-pays education expenses up to $12,000 for the workers pursuing degrees or certificates in the demanding field. The program grants the workers with a choice. Amazon focusses on educating lower level employees, which allows them for a greater salary. This also inspires workers to put more effort into their careers when they see their peers acquire new skills. The program also makes the staffs feel as if they are essential parts of the team set out to achieve a goal they all connect with. This feels like they are part of a thrilling journey with travelers who have a similar mind towards a delightful destination. Here the founder of the organization is usually the captain.
Amazon has a highly competitive setting for its workers. The competition is based on the concept of “Purposeful Darwinism” from its founder Bezos. The culture endorses individual accountability and the basics of work ethic. This motivates employees to make a start and take control in order to achieve more with little resources. So far, the culture has been able to deliver the desired results. In addition, Jeff Bezos inspires his workers with the idea of proving him wrong. Here he acknowledges the worker's job as the best when it proves him wrong on the topic of discussion. He also does not care about the location his employees work from as long as they deliver results on time and they uphold his standards. This allows employees especially in customer service to work at home (Kan et al, 2018).
Amazon currently employs approximately 566,000 people from all over the world. The number of workers continues to rise rapidly year after year. The company is currently the second company in the U.S to create jobs to over half a million individuals. The number keeps rising because of the company's benefits, values and culture, career opportunities and the work-life stability for its workers. The place also attracts many employees because the environment is so dynamic and full of intelligent people. More and more people seek jobs in the company because Amazon has the best CEO in the world. Its leadership is able to fight complacency, which expands its growth-rate calling for more workers (Amazon & E. C. 2015). The company also is growing by including new products and acquirements day after day. Amazon began selling books but in the last few years, it has grown to sell a wide variety of goods online.
Amazon needs to address some of its workforce trends. For instance, the highly competitive environment the company has created through its culture is hard on the employees. Some claim that they are even afraid of calling in sick and this has made many workers get to hospitals by use of ambulances from work. In addition, the company has created a hostile environment among its employees since its accused of rewarding bullies just because they were able to deliver results. In my opinion, in order to create a worker-friendly environment for its workers, it should come up with better schemes of awarding employees and not on the bases of merit only. In addition, the employees should be given time for vacation as many claim to not have them (Cheung et al, 2017). Amazon should borrow some trends from Alibaba, which is the world’s biggest retailer. Alibaba’s profits and online sales have exceeded all retailers in the U.S including Amazon.
Amazon makes buying of commodities no longer a chore through services such as auto-renewals, same-day supplies, and one-tap acquisitions. By use of the Amazon Go app, the users are able to easily do shopping. There is less queueing in retail shops since few people actually go to the shops in person. The wide use of mobile phones has made it easier for customers to buy commodities from wherever they are located and have them delivered to them in time. Also, the use of robots in the retail business has made the work easier and more efficient. Although this reduces the number of job opportunities available, Amazon uses robots widely in its fulfillment centers. This makes the loading of goods very easy and quick. In spite of all the challenges, the online shopping industry continues to grow widely because of the upcoming technology (Bernstein & D. 2015).
References
Amazon, E. C. (2015). Amazon web services. Available in: http://aws. amazon. Com/es/ec2/ (November 2012).
Cheung, J. H., Burns, D. K., Sinclair, R. R., & Sliter, M. (2017). Amazon Mechanical Turk in organizational psychology: An evaluation and practical recommendations. Journal of Business and Psychology, 32(4), 347-361.
Kan, I. P., & Drummey, A. B. (2018). Do imposters threaten data quality? An examination of worker misrepresentation and downstream consequences in Amazon's Mechanical Turk workforce. Computers in Human Behavior, 83, 243-253.
