HRM Assignment: An Analysis Of Human Resource Practices At Amazon

Question

Task: To prepare this HRM assignment, you will research the following: An Analysis of Human Resources Practices at Amazon. You are recommended to researching the issues and identifying how they impact Amazon's strategic mission as a company, their stakeholders, and in particular, their HR strategy. Then, provide a possible solution or two.

Answer

Introduction:
The company Amazon considered in the current HRM assignment is expanding their business since the nineteenth century, and they are expanding evenly around the entire world. Other than being one of the most successful companies in the world the company is also facing one of the major issues in the world (Cattero&D’Onofrio, 2018). One of the major problems for the company at the present moment is the problem they are facing at the internal structure of the company. Some of the issues such as the recruiting practices the work life balance, the issue with the cultures and discrimination are some of the major issues which have been identified at the organization (Mehra, 2018). Therefore, in the following report the issues would be identified, and the approaches would be suggested which can help in mitigating the issues.

An Analysis of Human resource practices at Amazon:
When it comes to Amazon, they are the online retail market company which is one of the leading markets in the industry and hence, human resource is playing a major role in the success of the company. The company tries to promote the personal and the group performance within the organization. However, the organization is facing some issues related to the HR practices which is taking place at the organization. One of the major issues which the company and their employees are facing is the discrimination at the workplace. There are complaints regarding the racial discrimination at the workplace by the HR managers. Management of the work life balance is also another issue which have been highlighted within the organization by the workers of the company. Therefore, the HR department of the company is facing quite a lot of issues regarding the employees and providing them a fair workplace culture (Wu &Gereffi, G. 2018).

Overall human resource strategies:
Over the years there are various companies which have got affected due to Covid-19 and therefore, with the following the one company which stood out in the crowd is Amazon. According to Carmody (2021), the HR strategies of the companies are depending on the nature of the business. Therefore, there are certain commenters who also mentioned the fact that, the success of the company is associated with the strategy of the higher employee turnover which could be one of the most appropriate methods applicable in the case of Amazon (Carmody, 2021).

Furthermore, there have been issues regarding the low retention policies which are one of the important roles in the HR strategies of the company and thus they are having some negative views for the same. They are showcasing the negative side of the capitalism and also the move towards the more democratic recruitment policies. One of the reports which also have been placed in the year 2015 which claimed that a percentage of their staffs would have to elaid off every year.

Racial Discrimination:
One of the cases which was brought to light when an employee of the organization who has been working for the company for the past one-yearhavefiled suits over the employee of the company for the racial discrimination. There are reports which have been filed tat, the woman of color has been facing issues regarding both explicit racism at work along with the systemic racism which leads to the lower promotion rates and the higher termination rates for the underrepresented minorities (Rey, 2021).Another reason for the following issue of discrimination within the culture is the cutthroat competition which is taking place at the organization, and they are often priorities the reputation which is also including the diversity, racial equity and the inclusion of work.

Work life balance:
Since for the Amazon the human resource is one of the primary bases of the company therefore, for the management of the diversity and the work life balance of the employees of the organization few of the human resource theory would be applicable. The company has created the target of achieving the higher level of performance which the employees have to achieve. The employees within the organization are facing the issue to maintain a balance between the work and the life (Williams, 2021). Moreover, there is always an extra workload for the people at the organization which is also making it impossible and hard for the people to co-op with the other members of the organization and hence again the work life balance is not taken into consideration. People complain to be getting the loads of work pressure from the manager which is creating a disbalance between the work life of the employee and the personal life of the employee.

Employee relations:
According to Heskett, (2021), the happiness of the employees within the organization is more important than the satisfaction of the customer from the success of the organization perspective. The managers of the company have tried to set a reasonably higher standard which seem to be impossible to achieve by the employees of the organization. Moreover, if they are not able to achieve the unreachable expectations they are suffering for significant distress. The management style of the company has been criticized to be one of the dominating one in the organization. Other than that, the management of the company have also been criticized for being insensitive therefore, despite the personal crisis they have been pushed to work and judged. In addition, they are expected to work for longer hours for a much longer period of time.

Possible Solution:
Based on the analysis of the issues which have been faced by the employees of the organization Amazon following are some of the key solutions which could be provided which could help in overcoming the following issues and they are as follows:

Since the racial discrimination is one of the major issues which are being faced at the organization, they need to take a look into the source of the issue. This could be because of a manager or the training which they are providing to their managers which needs to be changed. Other than that, they also need to incorporate policies and ethical laws which would be working against the following issue and help in mitigating the same. They also need to focus on the diversity focused hiring and representation process (Sánchez-Monedero,Dencik& Edwards, 2020).
For the solution of the work life balance the company needs to work on the human resource theories which could help the authority of Amazon. Theory of motivation is something which could be best applicable in the following case as the employees within the organization is of diverse nature (Dweck, 2017). They also need to create the faith within the employees for the company and motivate them to achieve the higher level of performance. Other than that, the organizational behavior theory is also having a deep impact over the management of the diversity and also the work life balance of the human resource (Eden & Ackermann, 2018).
One of the major areas where the company needs to work so that they are able tohave a better relationship with the employees is the benefits and the praise for the employees within the organization. They need to showcase the value of relationship between the employees within the organization and with the help of that the things which they would be able to achieve within the company. They also need to focus more on the harmony of the employees rather than the criticism which will not complicate the relationships of the employees.

Conclusion:
The primary purpose of the study is to analyze the various issues which the human resource of the company Amazon is facing and the possible solutions which could be followed to overcome the situation. Therefore, three of the primary issues which is being faced by the employees of the organization have been taken into consideration that is Discrimination, work life balance and the employee relations (Onkila&Sarna, 2021). Therefore, based on those issues three possible solutions have also been provided which could help in overcoming the situation at Amazon and make is suitable for the employees in terms of human resource which stands to be the major issue at present.

References:
Carmody, T. (2021). Amazon’s Staggering HR Failures. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://amazonchronicles.substack.com/p/amazons-staggering-hr-failures
Cattero, B., & D’Onofrio, M. (2018). Organizing and collective bargaining in the digitized “tertiary factories” of Amazon: a comparison between Germany and Italy. In Working in digital and smart organizations (pp. 141-164). Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-77329-2_8
Dweck, C. S. (2017). From needs to goals and representations: Foundations for a unified theory of motivation, personality, and development. Psychological review, 124(6), 689. https://moodle2.units.it/pluginfile.php/358466/mod_resource/content/1/2017%20Dweck%20PR.pdf
Eden, C., & Ackermann, F. (2018). Theory into practice, practice to theory: Action research in method development. European Journal of Operational Research, 271(3), 1145-1155. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0377221718304806 Heskett, J. (2021). What's Wrong With Amazon’s Low-Retention HR Strategy?. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/is-something-wrong-with-amazon-s-low-retention-hr-strategy
Mehra, M. R. (2018). Human Resource management and its importance for today’s organizations. Journal of HR, Organizational Behaviour & Entrepreneurship Development, 2(2), 15-20. http://management.nrjp.co.in/index.php/JHROBED/article/view/259
Onkila, T., & Sarna, B. (2021). A systematic literature review on employee relations with CSR: State of art and future research agenda. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management.https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/csr.2210 Rey, J. (2021). Amazon’s Black employees say the company’s HR department is failing them. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.vox.com/recode/22524538/amazon-diversity-black-employees-human-resources-department
Sánchez-Monedero, J., Dencik, L., & Edwards, L. (2020, January). What does it mean to'solve'the problem of discrimination in hiring? Social, technical and legal perspectives from the UK on automated hiring systems. HRM assignmentIn Proceedings of the 2020 conference on fairness, accountability, and transparency (pp. 458-468). https://arxiv.org/pdf/1910.06144.pdf
Williams, J. (2021). The Big Story. Retrieved 4 October 2021, from https://www.protocol.com/newsletters/sourcecode/amazons-hr-problem?rebelltitem=1#rebelltitem1
Wu, X., &Gereffi, G. (2018). Amazon and Alibaba: Internet governance, business models, and internationalization strategies. In International business in the information and digital age. Emerald Publishing Limited. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Gary-Gereffi/publication/328711863_Amazon_and_Alibaba_Internet_governance_business_ models_and_internationalization_strategies/links/5c60425192851c48a9c86b33/ Amazon-and-Alibaba-Internet-governance-business-models-and- internationalization-strategies.pdf