Amazon Marketing Strategies - Essay Example

Contents Contents Introduction 2 Literature Review 2 Review Findings 3 Research Objective 5 Research Methodology 5 Research Design 5 Sampling Strategy 6 Methodology 7 Schedule of Research 8 Analysis of the data 8 Conclusion 11 Introduction Amazon is the leading e-commerce organisation based in the USA, and was started in 1994 with a global presence that caters to almost all the countries of the world. The company has employed more than 109 thousand employees according to the employee census taken in 2013. Since it is an e-retail company, there is requirement that the technical staffs facilitate supply for their services through an online based retail market. The company depends on the competitive intelligence that can be gotten in the form of consumer data so that the company is able to understand the needs of the consumers. Consumer needs can be determined through their browsing history and can stock up their inventory levels as and when required for future references or to determine the expected form of orders that a certain level of the market can consider as relevant. It is vital for the business to have a combination of a good retail supply chain workforce and technical people who would be available within the company for the provision of technical support in the company’s operations. However, the turnover for Amazon is very high. This is because most of the employees do not stay in the organisation for more than one year. This paper has been documented in an attempt to establish the reasons for a high rate of turnover. The basis for the study is mainly primary and secondary research in regards to the factors that contribute towards understanding of the study item. The section of the literature review explores the studies that have been made by the authors about this issue of turnover in the business environment. Literature Review The topic of employee turnover has been studied and researched by a big number of scholars over a very long period. In the Human resources framework, the rate of turnover of the employees is the rate at which an employer acquires and loses his/her employees. The high rate of turnover is an indication of the fact that the employees in an organisation would work in the organisation for a shorter span of time. This rate is determined after a comparison with the other industries found within the same market. The turnover metric is determined by dividing the total number of parting workers who have left within a year by the number of employees who were engaged in the company for that particular year (Cascio and Boudreau, 2011, p. 80). The same metric has been used by Price in his model of turnover (Price, 1977, pp. 10-25) which may not be viewed as a recently published source but still plays a major role in contributing to the topic of employee turnover. For a particular labour market, there have often been the same numbers of employees that rotate around in the different companies within the same type of business. Most of the management practitioners have argued that there are several reasons that contribute to the turnover rate of the companies (Kevin, Joan and Adrian, 2004, pp. 161-166). The event of turnover is time consuming and the management of a company cannot officially stop an employee from leaving the organisation in the case that they decide to do so. In most cases the employees are lured away by other organisations operating in the same industry by offering a higher salary or better services for the workers within the company to the point of igniting interest in other employees working elsewhere whose main wish is to get better terms of employment. However, it has been found out through intensive research that the employees cite this reason only to disguise some other major reason for which they leave the organisation. Review Findings There are several other reasons for which an employee decides to leave an organisation. Job related stress is one of the causes which contribute to the high rate of turnover among the employees. The level of satisfaction in a particular job is also another major reason for the high rate of turnover. Most of the employees remain dissatisfied with the work that they perform and they feel that it does not meet their self actualization needs. Research has provided an insight to show that the level of compensation that the employees get from their present employer is not satisfactory or the perquisites are not up to the industry standards. This forces the employees to shift to a new organisation. On the other hand, in that case that manufacturing organisations or the companies that involve jobs that may expose the employees to a variety of risks, the employees may feel obliged to leave because of the hazardous working conditions they have been subjected to (Baron and Greenberg, 2008, pp. 24-39). The companies on the other hand may have their own attrition policies and may decide to downsize from time to time. There might be different reasons which might vary across the departments for the attrition of the employees. For example, a company serving in the financial software services may not require the previous set of employees due to introduction of a new technology. It may also happen that the new technology that is being implemented would not require the same amount of manpower as it did previously with the old technology. The companies may also fire an employee if he/she is unable to the deliver the services as was expected from him or her. The death or the incapacitation of an employee to work anymore would also add to the rate of turnover (Booth and Hamer, 2007, pp. 289-307). Thus it is important to understand if the phenomenon of turnover is a voluntary or an involuntary one. It would be voluntary if the employee by choice leaves the organisation and moves to another organisation. Alternatively it would be involuntary turnover if the organisation forcefully makes an employee to resign. The Unfolding Model is a theory that moves away from the conservative thinking about the employee turnover. Thus turnover is considered to be a phenomenon that occurs due to the changes in the decision making of the employees (Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner, 2000, pp. 463-88). The employers have to incur a lot of costs for the replacement of the employees. This is because with every employee recruited there is a cost of training and development as well as recruitment cost. The Unfolding Model theory can be applied in large companies such as Amazon to understand the type of employee turnover model used as well in the determination of the possible reasons that may have facilitated the employee turnover, whether voluntary or if the company imposed its will against the expectation of its employees by making them leave. Therefore, it is clear that there are a host of issues that add to the high rate of attrition in the large organisations around the world. Research Objective The desired objective in this case is to discover the issues that have contributed to the high rate of turnover in the company of Amazon. This is done to point out the areas where the company has failed to uphold ethical values or if it does not conform to the general practise done by the other organisations of the same strength. A sample of the employees of the U.K. business of Amazon has been taken so that the problems that the sample encounters in their day to day activities can provide a holistic idea about the general problem of the organisation in regard to employee turnover. Research Methodology A scientific research method has been adopted for getting correct and indicative results out of the study conducted for the issues relating to Amazon. Research Design A proper research design would allow the researcher to structure the entire process of research in a step by step manner so as to draw meaningful conclusion from the study conducted. In order to understand the opinion of the internal work process of Amazon and the reasons for the high level of attrition 12 ex-employees from different departments of the UK division have been interviewed in regards to their experience as they had once worked for the organisation. A proper questionnaire has been documented and presented to these people and their responses recorded. The compilation of the resources would help in the determination of the reasons for the high level of turnover witnessed in the company in the recent past. The research method is of an exploratory research because the study looks for the reasons for the high rate of turnover in Amazon in the UK divisions. This means that this process of research would try to look for the evidences that would prove the position of the researcher. The study can be considered as cross-sectional because it considers the employees who have left the organisation in the span of the last 2 years. Thus it captures the feature of the organisation from the perspective of the employees who have worked in Amazon for a specific time. The method that is taken in this particular study is a qualitative method. The responses have been analysed qualitatively at the end of the research. The interview method would be a face to face interview with the ex-employees. Since all the employees considered in the sample have left the organisation they are quite open to the interviewee for their responses (Cooper and Schindler, 2006, pp. 136-161). The sample that has been collected is a small sample survey due to time constraint in the period of the research. Sampling Strategy A sampling method was randomly adopted for carrying out the survey. The information of the past employees has been found from the employee portals. A number of employees were screened who had worked in the organisation for a particular time frame. Out of these a random sample of twelve employees were picked to participate in the survey method. In the simple random sampling, the twelve respondents are the representative of the entire population of the people considered for the survey (Deming, 1990, pp. 23-31). Methodology The questionnaire was constructed in a way to capture the different variables that are directly attached to the issue. Though the questions that have been asked are the dichotomous type, they are basically open ended which has provided the respondents with a lot of flexibility. They can state more than what is asked in the questions. The initial questions act like the warm ups which are comparatively easy for the respondents to answer. As the questions progress the level of difficulty increases (Mellenbergh, 2008, pp. 235–268). The questionnaire is administered face to face. Appointment with the ex-employees is made and they are orally asked and the responses are noted down by the interviewer. These responses are compiled and the redundancy in the data is cleaned by the use of specific techniques. Finally the responses are analysed to see if the research question has been sufficiently answered. Schedule of Research Wk 1 Wk 2 Wk3 Wk 4 Wk5 Wk6 Wk7 Wk8 Wk9 Wk 10 Research Question formulation Research Design Collection of the information about the employees Contacting the employees Administering the Questionnaire Compilation and Analysis of the Responses Consolidation Analysis of the data The main source of the data that has been collected for the survey is the individual responses. Each of the questions for the twelve employees have been analysed in this section of the report. The twelve employees have provided the tenures for which they have stayed in the organisation. While the highest among them is 1 year 2 months the least tenure would be 6 months. The median tenure found out from the survey is 8 months. This proves that the company has a high turnover because a company generally makes a human resources planning with an aim to retain an employee at least for the forthcoming couple of financial years. But in case of Amazon such manpower planning is not valid because most of the employees do not stay there even for one fiscal year. The employees who have been interviewed were a mixture from different departments. They included retail managers, inventory attendant, and analyst for the customer demands as well as engineers from the technical departments. There are different reasons that the employees in the UK division have shown. First of all the inventory and the retail manager considered that they had to work in the extremes of temperature inside the warehouses. Thus the employees would very easily fall sick. This had adverse effects on the long term health of the employees. Thus they preferred to work in such places in which their health and safety issues would be addressed. On the other hand, the analyst and the technical employees were of the opinion that they were not happy with the work hours in which they used to deliver their services. It also had negative effects on their health. Almost all the employees were of the opinion that they were not happy with the remuneration that they received from Amazon. They felt that other organisations within the same retail industry paid greater salary and hence they found it better to leave Amazon and join other companies. The employees said that they received training for the job that they performed but it was mainly on the job training. No separate training programme was provided to them as a new entrant. Some of the respondents even mentioned that the job training is the chief norm of the organisation and they consider separate training programmes for the employees to be costly because the rate of turnover is extremely high (Mento, Steel and Karren, 2007, pp. 52-83). Regarding the relationship of the immediate superior to the employees there were differences in opinion across the departments. While the employees of the retail division considered that there were less power distance and they could interact and provide feedback to their immediate seniors, the power distance was high in the technical and the analyst divisions of the company. The seniors of the retail and inventory divisions, however, were less capable of influencing the management as compared to the technical and the support divisions. This means that the problems that the employees faced in the organisation were never addressed in a proper manner. For the 7th question all the respondents provided a similar answer. The employees were of the opinion that there was no attempt on part of the company to stop the employees because this phenomenon was quite common for Amazon. In the final question the employees again provided the same answer that they would not want to come back to the organisation even if they were provided with any better offer. This shows that all the employees considered in the survey had left the organization with a negative impression and were having the same opinion about Amazon even at present when they were working somewhere else. This is because the unethical practices that having been presented in the discussion of the former employees as they describe the ways in which they were treated in their former workplace. In trying to relate the findings to current employees working under Amazon, none of the contacted individuals were willing to disclose their identities especially after they presented their side of the story which also stated levels of discontent with the working conditions. Out of the 5 current employees, 3 of them stated that they are currently working in dehumanizing conditions. The remaining 2 refrained from stating their stands on the matter of employee turnover and how it is related to the working conditions of the Amazon. Conclusion The studies thus conducted through the primary survey have supported the literatures that have been studied in the initial part of the report. From the scrutiny it is sclear that Amazon has several issues with their HR policies and there is immediate requirement for the organisation to review and restructure their employee retention and other HR policies. There are several ethical issues that are also involved in this case. The employees are forced to work in adverse temperatures and work environment and also for odd hours. This goes against the regulatory policies of UK regarding the labour laws and norms. Along with that it is also unethical on part of the organisation to force the employees to work in such cases ignoring their health and safety. Again the company does not take enough measures to retain the employees and has an exploitative attitude toward the employees. Therefore there is necessity for the HR department to motivate the company employees to have job satisfaction. Along with that the health and the safety of the employees have to be ensured by conducting regular checks and audits of the places of work. Training and orientation programmes have to be done from time to time to retain the employees in the organisation for a longer span of time. Read More