Introduction
Amazon’s administrative tasks heavily rely on human resource management (HRM). HRM is concerned explicitly with managing every employee inside a business. Consequently, it encompasses the selection, supervision, and management of staff. The HRM department is also responsible for safeguarding the workforce’s welfare by assuring safety, benefits, remuneration, training, improved communication, wellness, and motivation. Since HRM focuses on managing people, successful HRM is essential to ensuring that employees are happy in their positions, which in turn increases productivity and helps the business achieve its objectives. Many globally successful companies have emphasized the importance of efficient HRM. One of the most prosperous businesses with HRM worth imitating is Amazon Inc.
History of HR Policies
The earliest instance of human resource management was industrial welfare (HRM). Male factory inspectors were required under the 1833 factories legislation. A 60-hour work week was established by law in 1878 to limit women’s and children’s work hours. Trade unions began to emerge during this period. The first labor union congress took place in 1868. Collective bargaining officially started at this point. A conference was held in 1913 due to an increase in industrial welfare workers, which Seebohm Rowntree organized (Cattero et al. 140). After being established, the Welfare Workers’ Association became the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.
Everything began when Mary Wood was instructed to start dating ladies during the First World War. Government programs to promote the optimal use of people led to a rise in personnel development during the First World War (Bloom et al. 164). In munitions companies and explosives plants, welfare workers were encouraged in 1916. The army forces put up much effort in this area. Along with other research on human factors at work, the armed forces concentrated on how to test intelligence and aptitude. The National Institute of Psychologists was founded in 1921 and disseminated research findings on training procedures, interviewing strategies, and selection procedures.
Throughout the conflict, management and employees of Amazon began to consult with one another. This meant that its administration and structure fell within the purview of personnel departments. The emphasis shifted to health and safety and the necessity for professionals. The need for professionals to handle labor relations was acknowledged (Saez et al. 25). Thus, the personnel manager took on the role of the organization’s spokesperson during conversations with trade unions and shop stewards. Amazon’s industrial relations were particularly significant throughout the 1970s (Andresen, 300). The tense atmosphere at the time emphasized the value of a specialized position in labor relations negotiations. The personnel manager might negotiate deals on wages and other collective concerns.
Based on legislation, in the 1970s, as employment laws became more stringent, the personnel function assumed the specialized adviser’s position, ensuring that managers abide by the law and preventing cases from going to labor courts. Additionally, diversity and adaptability due to a rise in temporary and part-time employment and the creation of remote work, a significant trend occurred in the 1990s when businesses sought more flexible arrangements for the time employees worked (Zemtsov, 725). The workforce and work habits are diversifying, making old hiring approaches ineffective. A full-time culture began to emerge around 2000 as internet usage increased. As a result, employment in conventional industries like retail was lost. At the same time, new jobs were generated in e-commerce (Zhao et al. 10). Therefore, a career in traditional sectors like retail was lost while new jobs were generated in e-commerce. Employees would now have more opportunities to work remotely. Organizations must carefully consider the problems these advancements bring up. As changes happen, so will the role of HRM managers.
HR Competencies
The first competency is knowledge of human resources. This is the capability to understand and use the rules and procedures of human resource management to help a company succeed. Relationship management is the next. This is about individuals’ ability to manage interpersonal relationships, assist line managers, and support the organization. Consultation is crucial to providing direction capacity to staff, managers, and other stakeholders (Kantor et al. 15). Individuals’ ability to guide and contribute to performance and procedures like hiring, performance management, and rewards fall under leadership and navigation.
Additionally, communicating with Amazon’s coworkers, bosses, and other stakeholders is crucial at all levels, allowing an individual to share knowledge and show understanding. A person’s capacity to appreciate and consider the histories and viewpoints of all parties is related to this. This is known as global and cultural effectiveness. The seventh competency is supporting, upholding, and modeling the organization’s values while minimizing risk (Zhao et al. 10). It is called ethical practice. Analyzing critically is the ninth competency.
Effective Recruitment and Selection
One of the top four technological businesses in the US is Amazon Company, a worldwide conglomerate that provides services, including artificial intelligence, digital streaming, e-commerce, and cloud computing. The business is now acknowledged as a powerful economic force with the most valuable brand globally (Cattero et al. 141). The corporation requires a lot of personnel because of its numerous operations, particularly those in the service sector. These workers must be chosen and hired from a large pool of eager applicants to work for the organization. Amazon utilizes a recruiting engine to find and hire people. However, the engine is biased against women since its creators built the computer program.
Commerce is in charge of setting prices and controlling what happens inside warehouses. The company’s experimental hiring tool used artificial intelligence to offer candidates scores between one and five stars, similar to how Amazon rates its items. The devices would then go through all the applications to find the top candidates who would be considered for employment. This meant that applicants would need to submit their applications. It was a significant accomplishment that everyone was looking forward to. The optimal tool would have avoided all prejudices and biases about people and their limits due to their emotions and intolerance (Zhao et al. 11). However, the business discovered that its new system was not gender-neutrally grading its applicants for technical employment and software development roles after the tool was developed and operational in 2015. This is due to the engine’s training to check and verify the candidates who submitted these applications by looking for trends in the resumes submitted over the previous ten years. This suggested that since technology is primarily male-dominated, the top resumes would come from guys.
The Amazon engine system taught itself that men who submitted job applications were more likely to get hired than women. The algorithm even scanned resumes for terms that would suggest an applicant was a woman and punished them, making it harder for Amazon to hire women. People familiar with the system took care to leave out any information on their resumes that would suggest they were female to have a fair shot at work and prevent being discriminated against because they were female by a computer (Zhao et al. 8). After realizing the system was biased against women, Amazon software developers changed the programs to make them fair to all candidates. There was no assurance that the machine wouldn’t develop new criteria for grouping candidates and discriminating against them based on this or other traits. The business examined and modified its program and finally decided to dissolve the team since it no longer had any faith in the program’s performance.
Process Systems Used at Amazon
The effectiveness of core business activities, including ordering, transaction processing, order fulfillment, and customer relationship management, determine how effective Amazon’s information systems are at running their business. To better business process analysis, Amazon has effectively linked several information system components with its database and customer relationship management system (Anshari et al. 100). Decentralizing decision-making procedures and enhancing information openness are accomplished through this process. Due to this, the firm has been able to use business intelligence analytics to comprehend the market environment and inform the creation of improvement initiatives to guarantee that the systems can process more orders in a given amount of time. To improve understanding of variations in demand and supply, the Amazon information management system creates a virtual replica of the physical marketplace (Anshari et al. 99). Customer inquiries can be handled more quickly, and business processes can be automated by integrating communication structures and the information system. Additionally, the order processing and delivery systems have been streamlined to work in tandem with the ordering process to improve the real-time resolution of customer inquiries and ensure the smooth operation of business processes.
The information system sends a query to the data warehouse and makes the product details available to the customer’s console when a customer puts an order through the online service. The payment processing system leads the consumer to the payment form once they have selected a product they are happy with and added it to their shopping cart. The customer enters their location and makes an electronic payment on this form. Through email or short message service, the consumer gets a payment confirmation and information about the purchase (Zhao et al. 16). The supply chain system receives the payment information from the transaction system and automatically records it before preparing the order for delivery. The supply chain system alerts the consumer through SMS or the postal service that the goods have been delivered.
Compensation
The complete spectrum of perks depending on full-time or part-time coworkers was confirmed by Nina Lindsey, Amazon Communications Manager, coupled with full disclosure of several incentive programs offered to employees of Amazon. Coworkers working full-time at distribution centers receive the same rewards as senior managers. These benefits consist of reasonable pay, equity in the firm, and a twenty-week paid leave period (Shin et al. 390). Coworkers also receive Leave Share and Ramp Back benefits for all Amazon employees who may become new parents or add to their families in addition to the aforementioned standard benefits. If a worker does not have access to paid leave to cover the birth of a child, Leave Split enables them to share paid leave from Amazon with a domestic partner or spouse.
Health and Safety
The utilization of training opportunities, including microlearning, just-in-time training, and learning by doing, to assist employees in comprehending how to use the tools and procedures intended to keep them safe is a significant priority. This allows our workers to improve their safety knowledge and abilities continuously. Persons continuously teach subjects like body mechanics and fall dangers through frequent reminders, notifications when signing on to workstations, and messages in our mobile app for employees (Shin et al. 401). Additionally, every operations manager participates in yearly safety training emphasizing fundamental ideas like danger identification and emergency readiness.
Furthermore, when individuals have the resources to look after their health at work and home, they are less likely to get hurt and feel better, healthier, and happier. To assist new workers in successfully adjusting to working at Amazon, our ground-breaking WorkingWell program educates them about their bodies, health, and well-being using academic research and licensed sports trainers (Shin et al. 400). Huddles, which are sessions amongst small groups of workers addressing subjects like training, conditioning, bending, and handling goods, is one way that WorkingWell keeps supporting staff after the onboarding process.
Ethics
Amazon has also violated ethical standards by avoiding paying taxes. Tax avoidance helped Amazon become what they are today. Jeff Bezos came up with a means to get around the rule that only physical firms must collect sales taxes after selling goods online after it was created (Kirner 39). According to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy, Amazon only managed 11% of its about $8 billion yearly revenues in the preceding five years or roughly one-third of what it would have received (Edmondson et al. 67). There haven’t been any effects on the business since that time.
Regarding the mistreatment of its employees, Amazon frequently uses several temporary hires hired through subcontracting to run its warehouse. Many temporary employees are employed around Christmas and abruptly let go with little to no warning. At Amazon, there is no formal mechanism for how this operates (Kantor et al. 15). It has been determined that the business is seeking the most affordable method to complete the assignment and that utilizing temporary labor is ethically acceptable for their requirements.
Therefore, employees must follow all applicable laws, rules, and regulations by the company’s code of conduct. Nevertheless, staff members should try to avoid conflicts of interest, and those who believe there may be one should alert the legal team right once (Yu et al. 364). Employees of the company are not allowed to trade stocks or other securities. In addition, while possessing material nonpublic information, one must not divulge such information to third parties without the company’s explicit consent or urge them to trade stocks or other securities based on that knowledge (Cattero et al. 148). Additionally, Amazon.com provides safe, clean, and healthy working environments (Caraway 74). Each employee has a role in maintaining a safe and healthy workplace by following safety and health rules and procedures and reporting incidents resulting in injuries, accidents, unsafe conditions, practices, or behaviors.
Conclusion
The report emphasized the value of HRM at the Amazon Company. It is clear how vital human resources are to any corporation because the company has relied on them to flourish over the years. The paper covered the importance of employees and the company’s recruitment, reward, and retention strategies and how they connect to the entire business plan. The company has made considerable efforts in human resources management, which has helped to sustain employee engagement and recruit and retain exceptional people. Therefore, like other businesses, Amazon explains how it perceives and manages employee perks and compensation in its incentive package. An incentive strategy may attract new employees and motivate present coworkers if appropriately applied.
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