Corporate Citizenship Audit: 1st Draft
Companies like Amazon, Facebook, and Google are often described as great companies because they create products or provide services that have a positive impact for consumers. These companies are innovators and the products that they produce provide a benefit to society. However, a great company in the eye of the consumer does not necessarily translate to a great working environment for employees. Companies are not perfect and at some point choices are made that lead to problems within a company. This happened to Amazon.
The problem with Amazon is that employees are not valued. Instead, the customer has top priority. This is not necessarily wrong, but it comes down to how employees are treated in the
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From the beginning, Amazon’s culture has been based on the personality of its founder and CEO, Jeff Bezos. Bezos’ ideas have created the $250 billion dollar business that Amazon is today. Bezos has pushed the idea of putting the customer first and is driven by a data-driven management philosophy. Like most corporations, Amazon has a code of business Conduct and Ethics that outlines how the company expects its employees to behave. According to the company website, employees are supposed to abide by the law, work in the best interest of Amazon, refrain from discrimination and harassment, and follow other basic guiding principles (Amazon.com). The code of ethics is vague in terms of how employees should be treated by the company and coworkers. Along with this code, Amazon has a list of 14 leadership principles that employees are expected to abide by in their day-to-day work. These leadership principles are supposed to guide employees in their decision making and are a statement of what the company values.
The specific ethical issue facing Amazon is how employees are treated. There are three main reasons contributing to this ethical issue: the work environment, employees are expected to always put their job first, and employees are seen as expendable.
The first issue is the work environment that Amazon creates for employees, this includes the company
Amazon employees are left feeling angry because they are being given low-paid wages for overworking. This effects Amazon heavily as they are having employees leaving the company and the company it's self has to bring in agency workers as temporary employees. This would mean
In the article, “Amazon.com is a 21st century Deal with the Devil” the author Amy Koss makes her piece an argumentative writing. She tries to persuade the reader that the company, Amazon, is cruel and untrustworthy. The author states,”They’re offering deals and deeper discounts, closing branches, consolidating staff, trying to fend off the inevitable. According to the feds, there have been 60,000 retail jobs in just the last two months.” I disagree with the author’s statement and believe that Amazon is just doing what they have to do, so they can make money and build a stronger business. It isn’t exactly Amazon’s fault that other businesses are closing making people loses their jobs. The other businesses must have their prices very high, making
Key Issues for Amazon. The key issue for Amazon.com is that the company’s median tenure is 1.0 years according to the article, “Why Google and Amazon Employees Are Out The Door In Barely A Year” by Anya Kamenetz. Having a high turnover rate can be very critical to a company’s downfall; therefore, the question here is why is Amazon’s employee turnover so high? MSNmoney published the article, “6 reasons Amazon employees burn out so fast” which gives some insight to why so many employees leave this ever so growing company. The main reason would be because of the CEO, Jeff Bezos. According to the article, Bezos is very freighting to
This sort of global expansion adds great complexity to the functionality of Amazon’s management, personnel, operation systems, technical performance, financial resources, and internal financial control and reporting functions. With the perplexity of current situations, Amazon may not be able to sustain growth effectively, which ultimately could bring damage to their reputation and limit their operating growth as well. .
The corporate culture at Amazon can be described as a task culture according to Charles Handy’s theories of corporate culture, where the main focus is on getting results from the work done. Individuals and teams are empowered to take responsibility and make a contribution. As a result, formal job titles are of less importance, as the emphasis is put on their contribution and problem-solving abilities. (Hoang 194). Amazon has created a sense of belonging and unity within its’ workforce by installing the idea that anyone can contribute. This can be seen through the 14 leadership principles that Amazonians refer to as the “articles of faith”, outlining how employees should act. It is at the core of Amazon’s corporate culture; It’s used in daily rituals, in hiring, at meetings and are quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime (Streitfeld). Most importantly, it applies to all Amazonians and they are told each one of them is a leader (Sanghani). For instance, the co-inventor of the delivery-by-drone project announced in 2013 was a junior level engineer (Streitfeld). Therefore, the task-oriented culture can be the source of the stressful work-environment stress despite fostering motivation and responsibility within the employees.
Amazon, a powerful company, has challenged many of its competitors and nearly causing them to go bankrupt. Jeff Bezos has taken amazon through changes and seemingly all for the better.
Amazon has earned a great reputation in customer service for allowing customers to shop without face to face, avoiding talking to a customer’s service representative agent on the phone, everything it done online. Sales clerk does not exist, everything is ordered with a click of the mouse, and arrives extremenely quick in the mail (Cohen, 2009). Amazon at interval has gotten involved with the customers when they can have too. According to Green, H. (2009), “Amazon stands out most markedly from other companies, and helps explain how the company earned the No. 1 spot on Business Week’s customer service ranking this year”( para. 1).
Amazon.com is a customer centric company. They put more effort in improving their system to make the experience of customer more comfortable so that he keeps on returning to the website. Jeffery Bezos who is the founder of the Amazon.com started this company after seeing the use of internet increasing rapidly.
Amazon focuses on global reach, putting customer first,, and extensive selection of products through its vision which is “To be Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online” (Gregory 2016).
Unfortunately, Bezos autocratic style has had profound effects on Amazons culture. Perhaps most importantly, Bezos has created a culture of metrics. Consequently, it has led to a competitive atmosphere, which has created an uncomfortable working environment for many employees. For example, some employees have sabotaged their cohorts
While Amazon faces many issues in a rapidly changing economic, political and global environment, this paper will focus on how Amazon can increase loyalty among its customers and continue to differentiate
Usually the work environment at Amazon is considered to be stressful. Based on reports Amazon is found out to have a stressful and inflexible work environments. According to Madeline Stone (2015) the employees at Amazon were asked to harshly critique their peers and those suffering personal crisis where pushed out of their positions. Moreover reports suggest that the employees has cited the fact that Bezos is highly prejudiced and informs those challenging him that he is the CEO of the company. So from this we can drive to a conclusion that Bezos Style of leadership is not satisfactory for the workers at Amazon.
Amazon’s fulfillment centers are valuable, rare, costly to imitate, and organized to captured value. Thus, they attribute to Amazon’s competitive advantage. Amazon Prime and 1-Click are also valuable to the organization. However, they can be replicated. Walmart launched a membership program to compete with Amazon’s Prime Service. With Walmart’s membership program customers receive free two-day shipping when they spend $35 or more on orders. Amazon Web Services is valuable, rare, costly to imitate and the organization has capture the value of it. Therefore, AWS has contributed to Amazon’s sustainable advantage. Amazon’s brand name and reputation have also given the company sustainable advantage. Amazon acquired enormous brand valuation in a short period of time. It is
Corporate citizenship is commonly defined as ?a company's management of its influences on and relationships with the rest of society? (Marsden 2000: 9). A recent study conducted by Hill and Knowlton found that 79% of Americans consider corporate citizenship when deciding to buy a particular company?s product, 36% of which considered corporate citizenship to be an important factor (Verschoor, 2001: 20). This shows us that by achieving good corporate citizenship, a company?s practices become transparent to the interested public and provide a basis for accountability for the future (Waddock, 2000: 324).
Amazon.com Inc. better known simple as Amazon was created by current CEO Jeff Bezos on July 5, 1994. Based out of Seattle, Washington and “Once just a bookseller, Amazon is now the biggest online store on the planet” (O 'Connor, 2013). This growth can be attributed to how Bezos foresaw the advantages of online retailing and cornered the market before others, but sustaining this success needs more than that. A major component of Amazon’s continuing success is their drive to provide unparalleled customer service. The importance of customer service is seen from the top of the company to the bottom, from the attitude of the creator to the basic training of all employees.