Joseph Aigbojie

Human Resources Management Final

An organization cant proclaim to care about the customer and also proclaim that

everything is driven for him or her (the customer), yet at the same time fail to acknowledge

the value of its most important customers, its employees. As an HR consultant, I am concerned

that your company preaches customer service, yet fails to acknowledge value and even dignify

its most important customers, the employees who should be viewed as internal customers.

There is still more humbug in the air because Amazon treats a second significant

grouping of men and women with whom it has dealings its employees with the very

opposite of care and trust, however the people that are treated with the very opposite of care

and trust are tasked with being customer centric people that care about customers (Head,

2014). In order for employees to truly be customer centric, they must first learn about

customer service at home, home being their employer. I propose the elimination of

unconsciously excluding the thoughts, ideas, concerns and issues of your team members and

make the recommendation of instituting an annual employee input survey. This survey will

serve as a platform for your employees to inform you about how they feel theyre being

treated, if their ideas are considered and valued and if they feel that they are truly rewarded for

the job that they do. It is my belief that this approach will tremendously improve the

management relations in your organization.

It is my belief that you should transition from disregarding the thoughts, ideas, concerns

and issues that employees may have but might be fearful of presenting to you due to fear of
retaliation or possibly being terminated to engaging their thoughts, ideas, concerns and issues

with the implementation of an annual employee input survey. Essentially, youd be

implementing Strategic Human Resources Management or at least the beginning phases of

having established SHRM for your company. The employee input survey would allow for the

initiation of a SHRM policy. It would allow for the establishment of a partnership between

managers and employees. Working together provides managers and employees a better

understanding of HRM issues, and HRM staff becomes more informed about the needs of the

employees and departments. SHRM is a process that must be implemented throughout the

organization. The goal is to make the SHRM process one that becomes the template for

organizational change and innovation (Pynes, 2009, page 57). In the case of Amazon, the

employee input survey will serve as the template for organizational change and innovation.

In order to set this employee input survey up, we need to begin by establishing some

sort of criteria. We need to decide what questions will be on the survey? What questions do

you think are pertinent to your frontline staff? Essentially with this questioning, we will be

training staff to voice their concerns and in addition to that, well be training managers to be

responsive to the concerns of task. This will be a 3 part module. The first part will entail the

staff actually taking the survey. The second part of the module will entail us gathering the

information received from the survey and the 3rd part will be the presentation of the results of

the survey to the staff along with management and the staff collectively coming up with

solutions to key problems that were noted from the survey.

 Module 1

SURVEY QUESTIONS

Does the person I report to treat me with respect?

Am I satisfied with my job security?

I have faith and trust that the information from this survey will be used to make

improvements

Does Amazon provide me with career development opportunities?

Am I satisfied with my benefits?

Do I get the training that I need to do a good job?

Does Amazon care about employee safety?

Does Amazon support me in balancing my work life and personal life?

Are my ideas and suggestions seriously considered?

Is there a climate of trust within my work area?

Am I involved in the decisions that affect my work?

Am I satisfied with the recognition that I receive for doing a good job?

Is my work area adequately staffed?

We will enable employees to anonymously answer these questions. Well create an

online database that allows employees to take the survey online during their free time.

We will then tally up the results. Once weve received all of the results, well provide

Amazon leadership with a summary of the results. We will break the results down by
strengths and weaknesses. Well identify 6 strengths that Amazon has scored notably well

on. Well also identify 6 weaknesses in which scores were particularly low on.

The areas for improvement on the survey will serve as talking points and action items

for the management teams of Amazon. The action item/planning piece is essentially part 2

of the training module.

Module 2

During the action planning phase, managers should

Identify 1 area of focus based on the survey results. This should essentially be

the lowest scoring item or a cluster of low scoring items that fit within a theme.

Both managers and front line staff should work together in identifying 2 possible

solutions to whatever the area of focus is that has been identified. The solution

process should be a collective buy-in of both team members and managers.

There needs to be implementation of a sustained meeting schedule during the

course of the year that serves as a platform for both management and staff to

evaluate the solutions and adjust accordingly.

 This initiative/training module will be presented to Amazon executives via power

point presentation. High level people value presentations that are factual and get

straight to the point. The presentation will highlight many of the employee concerns

that we noted. We should start by presenting the article Worse than Wal-mart:

Amazons sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating workers. The

purpose of presenting the article and findings from it would be to compel the top

executives. We want to show them how their current employment conditions are

causing them to be portrayed on a global level.

In addition to that, we will take a sort of Undercover Boss approach in regards

to the training. Undercover Boss is a television show where executives of companies

dress in disguise and work alongside their frontline staff members. The goal of the show

is for executives to experience what their frontline staff deals with on a day to day basis

with the hopes that the experience compels them to improve the working conditions of

the staff that report to them. Having reviewed the article, we feel that it is very

important that those on the senior leadership level of Amazons hierarchy

see/experience the working conditions that are being spoken of.

The Undercover Boss approach will entail the senior level leadership members

spending one week working alongside frontline staff. They will enter the establishments

as new employees needing to be trained. We prefer that this experiment be done after

the employees have taken the employee input surveys. The thinking is that the

experience of the senior level people (working alongside frontline staff) will prove to be
significant as it pertains to insuring the frontline staff that management on all levels are

interested, engaged and buying into the concept of creating a better workplace for their

employees. The experience will also help with action planning, making changes and

sustaining improvement. We want the employees to buy in. What better way for

them to buy into this initiative of change than for them to see company executives

working in the same conditions as them and under the same scrutiny?

Finally, after all of the executives have worked alongside the staff for the week,

multiple meetings will need to be conducted. These meetings will comprise of frontline

staff, supervisors/managers and executives. The executives will then reveal themselves

to the frontline staff. They will speak on their experiences in regards to the week that

was spent working. In addition to this, they will speak to the staff about the results of

the input survey. Executives will then task supervisors/managers with following through

on the action planning piece of the survey. Executives should check in with supervisors

on a quarterly basis to see what the progress of the action planning has been and what

the results are.

 Works Cited Page

Pynes, J. (2009). Human resources management for public and nonprofit organizations: A
strategic approach. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

Worse than Wal-Mart: Amazons sick brutality and secret history of ruthlessly intimidating
workers. (n.d.). Retrieved May 06, 2016, from
http://www.salon.com/2014/02/23/worse_than_wal_mart_amazons_sick_brutality_and_secret_hi
story_of_ruthlessly_intimidating_workers/