Background

Amazon employs thousands of workers all across the world and provides work form home opportunity. The work from home opportunities that are provided by Amazon consists of a variety of different types of roles. People from diverse backgrounds and skill sets can do their job and fulfill their responsibilities by working remotely. Working from home also has multiple advantages which saves on your outside food and gas expenses. The working from home job includes various types of human resource, administrative, software engineering, and project management type of jobs. Many of these jobs rarely requires candidate to go to physical Amazon office location for months. Many candidates who are working currently remotely from their home have never even seen Amazon office physically.

Amazon pays fairly good and much higher than the industry and country minimum wages as compensation to its employees. You can find the Amazon salary details below. Even though Amazon pays a lot to its employees, many employees have often highlighted a variety of advantages and disadvantages of working at Amazon. Regarding the Employee Benefits, Amazon provides one of the best in the industry with multiple types of vacation days and good retirement plan. Based on the experiences of variety of employees who have worked at Amazon warehouses and fulfillment centers, there are a lot of automations as well which needs little manual intervention. In these types of cases, work from home jobs are not available because the candidate has to physically work in the warehouses of Amazon.

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Amazon Employee Experiences

There are a variety of self service kiosks which are operated by traditional human resource functions. There is an app which is known as A to Z which handles everything in Amazon, starting from payroll to changes in schedule of its employees. The feedback that has been provided by the Amazon employees for these types of apps is very high in place. Employees Amazon have mentioned that they have found the Amazon A to Z app very easy to use, and have also given it a very high rating in the Apple App Store. But there is a dilemma among the employees who use this app. Employees at Amazon who use this app for their work often mentioned that employees should be able to speak to a real person when they need help. Employees are instead redirect to the virtual chatbot in the mobile app to get individual help.

This feedback becomes concerning because many employees have complained that they got fired from their job because chat representatives often forget to address their queries or the message does not get through. For an organization as large as Amazon and which is aiming to achieve the highest level of customer satisfaction, issues of its employment of its employees due to a simple chatbot seems concerning. The technology that Amazon has used to develop its mobile app is designed to give its workers a variety of ways to communicate and not only rely on human individuals. The mobile app that Amazon employees often use from their home as well is not meant to replace live interaction between humans.

Amazon Communication Gaps and Concerns

The Amazon app help process has been often used to minimize a workforce to enhance the financial condition in the company. The human resource staff for warehouse workers have also grown by a significant percentage over the last three to four years. There has been a rise in the number of staff for warehouse workers at Amazon. The Human Resources team is often in thousands now and earlier used to be less than a hundred only a decade ago. Many candidates who are grateful to join different teams at Amazon struggle to manage their leaves. And after they come back, they highlight how the work destroys their mental health and stability. Many of the employees who work at Amazon have shared their experiences of working remotely as well as working in the Amazon warehouses.

One employee said they had taken a leave from Amazon and when he returned later on a doctor's note, he could not reach the company to ask questions regarding when he can join back. The Amazon attendances systems recorded the candidate as a no show. Due to this reason, the candidate began getting job abandonment notices. Because the candidate was not able to reach a human personnel and get a fruitful reply, he threw his hands up and allowed himself to lose that job at Amazon that he had worked so hard for. Once this news about the particular worker went out and reporters started reaching out to Amazon for comments, the company surprisingly offered that candidate his job back.

Amazon Employee Job Incidents

The senior management at Amazon have often highlighted that specific cases of such employees can be handled better and that employees should not have to leave the company in the first place due to the situation they face. Amazon wanted to make sure that this situation is not faced by any other employee in the future again. The employees who worked at Amazon had highlighted that the health insurance that Amazon provides covers most of their medical bills. However, one employee said they discovered that her husband's short term disability payments had stopped. The kept sending the medical forms but they were not sure if anyone on the other end was actually receiving the forms that they were sending.

They had dreamed to buy a house but now they could not afford that and relied on donations from their friends. The human resources manager who worked at Amazon recognized the mistake that has been caused for this associate and paid the 10 weeks of missed payments that was due for this candidate’s disability. Amazon has often used an incentive so that their employees come back to offices. Amazon once used a nationwide $2 an hour raise and double overtime pay. However, that was taken away because extra wages were not considered hazard pay. But it was only an incentive so that candidates would show up at work. This decision to force workers back helped Amazon build one of the most profitable times in history. It was one of the top performing warehouse models across any of the other organizations.

Amazon Employee Tracking

The Human Resources department at Amazon were excited because they were performing so much well and the employees were apparently managed in such a great fashion. In the way Amazon performed, brought it billions of dollars in earnings every quarter. The revenue for Amazon kept on rising and rising, and with people returning to work, it made the condition even more favorable. It was almost like Black Friday that Amazon was dealing with every month. People were working extremely efficiently and the demand was enormous that had to be met. There was nothing there that would slow down Amazon. It was identified by reporters that what helped boost thousands of employees to a high level of performance was setting the pace at an organizational level.

The speed was essential for Amazon to help build the momentum, and at the same time keeping the whole warehouse in rhythm was critical. If the new items were unpacked quicker, then they could be prepared for shipping faster. The supply chain at Amazon warehouses might jam if not managed efficiently. The fulfillment center at Amazon is one particular area in a bigger ecosystem of warehouses, and had to be coordinated with a large number of delivery drivers. The management had to maintain a steady and strong pulse. There were a couple of measurements that dominated. The hourly employees shifts rate measured how fast the employees work, which is a constantly fluctuating figure that is displayed at each of the individual stations. Time off task or TOT is tracked continuously.

Amazon Performance Tracking

The Amazon associates are provided their assignments their employee performance measurements are taken. This measures whether associates are going to the bathroom or troubleshooting any broken machinery or talking to a co worker. Amazon innovated new methods and approaches that helped calculate such metrics a few decades ago. It was during that time that Amazon was taking over the warehouse segment by adapting and introducing new technologies to bring in a revolution that no one has seen before. The emphasis on productivity by tracking and evaluating it in a company as large as Amazon was met critically by a variety of stakeholders and representatives. People had been critical that productivity metric is a dangerous thing and people might feel stressed.

Many of the employees also felt that they felt stress that one slip at work, and they might fall behind. There has been newer robotics driven warehouses at Amazon, where metrics were more at the center of Amazon's operations using the analytics and automation metrics and technologies. One particular manager who is working at the frontline, can keep track of up to 100 workers by simply checking at the laptop. There are also reports that get auto generated and create notifications when any particular worker at Amazon is struggling. If there are workers who are not too fast or are found too slow, and whose time off among the tasks have become too high, they come at risk of getting disciplined or fired. If a worker is found to be off task, then the system assumes that the worker was to blame.

The manager said Amazon often requested to talk to workers and get to know the situation that they faced and actually what happened. Then the managers were requested to manually enter any legitimate excuses that they come across after talking to the associate, like broken machinery to override the default reasons that were generated by the system. It has been found and reported by various types of internal documents at Amazon that managers were instructed to address the top offender at Amazon warehouses who is getting flagged multiple times for time of tasks in each department per shift. Due to time of tasks violations, there has been reports of terminations in Amazon which is less than 1% of the events logged.

Amazon Employees Tracking Mental Pressure

Many of the workers who worked at Amazon were not aware of the metrics and this tracking process that was used to identify their performances. The goal of this tracking process that has been identified by the internal Amazon guidelines mentioned that this is to create an environment not where everyone is writing everyone up against charges, but it is supposed to make associates understand and know that Amazon is auditing for time off task or TOT. Workers at Amazon could not immediately see their time of task totals, which increased their anxiety. Due to this reason, it was extremely critical for workers that they take lesser and lesser time off to improve their metrics. Workers did not know what is their score, and they felt pressurized to work harder and take lesser time offs.

The word spread that Amazonians were not allowed to take bathroom breaks, which is actually a misconception that stemmed from real apprehension of getting fired at their job due to poor time of task metrics. Many of the employees who worked at Amazon chronicle their workday down to the minute in a particular notebook, which they kept to themselves. They believed these would help them just in case they came under the observation of the management who would ask them what they did during their time offs. This led to anxiety and poor mental state, but at the same time it increased the productivity of workers dramatically and helped Amazon overall.