How Amazon India Uses Science to Make Lives Easier for Employees

Jeff Bezos has a dream. And no, it doesn’t involve space. What he wants is Amazon to emerge as the “Earth’s Best Employer”. While this dream may be a relatively recent one, Amazon India has been taking feedback from employees for long. In fact, employees begin their day by answering a single work-related question around leadership, recognition and job satisfaction. And this daily survey came in handy when the pandemic led to increased stress levels. The company quickly retuned these questions to understand how employees were feeling about safety, wellness, mental fitness and more. The HR team looked at the score on a daily basis, addressed their concerns promptly and saw the work-life harmony scores improve significantly.

“We could measure and improve employee experience quickly only because we had a tool like ‘Connections’. This is part of our approach where we consider HR as a scientific organisation that uses technology wherever possible to make a direct impact on our customers and employees. We look at simple scaleable mechanisms to automate processes wherever we can instead of making them operationally heavy,” says Deepti Varma, Director-HR for Amazon in APAC and Middle East. This is one of the many examples of the scientific approach of leveraging data and anecdotes that Amazon’s HR team—now called the People Experience and Technology Team—deploys to innovate and invent on behalf of its employees and customers. Amazon India, which has topped the BT-Taggd Best Companies to Work For in India ranking this year, says it employs 100,000-plus people in the country.

During the pandemic, when employees and managers felt constrained about the on-boarding processes, Amazon took the help of its smart assistant Alexa to handle information that was repetitive and common. For people uncomfortable talking to Alexa, it started a chat bot. This experiment was initially carried out in India and later picked up by its global teams to hire thousands of employees during the last two years. It also introduced tech tools to conduct interviews to understand and analyse experience busters for employees and change policies in real time to help it come a step closer to the dream of Bezos.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s gender equity initiatives cover the full spectrum with dedicated programmes for the grassroots-, middle management- and senior levels. At the grassroots level, Amazon WoW offers a networking platform for all women engineering students in India. It allows them to connect with Amazon’s leaders and recruiters, participate in skill-building sessions, utilise available resources, converse with alumni on their career experiences, and get hired if found suitable. Pinnacle helps middle management women grow into leadership roles. “We realised that this is the time of their career when women go through different life stages including marriage, becoming mothers, having teenager kids or aged parents to look after... We invested in group mentoring so that they can learn from what others are doing to handle the stress,” says Varma. At the senior level, Sunshine offers a platform for women leaders across industries to engage with and get mentored by the biggest leaders at Amazon.

Varma says the company is not rushing to get its employees back to office. “There are people operating out of offices, but we have not mandated it. Our workforce is very different, comprising of various departments—including Prime Video, operations team, technology team, Alexa Labs, AWS—so we can’t have a one-size-fits-all policy. Our policy is to offer flexibility but give the onus to the leader of the team to decide how many days they need to work from office or home,” she says. Amazon was experimenting with flexi models even before the pandemic, she adds. During Covid-19, it hastened the process of implementing some of these, which helped to fast-track the transition to remote working at the peak of the pandemic.

Varma says Amazon would have a hybrid model. “Amazon had 20,000+ employees joining globally in the last two years. Some of them haven’t met their leaders or team in person. So I think there is this excitement to come to office to meet their colleagues and that flexibility is given to the leader [to decide the schedule].”

To deal with the increased stress levels during Covid-19, Amazon introduced Project Harmony—buddies for every team to enable employees to interact with others to understand what they were going through, share experiences, give and receive tips on better work-life harmony and learn how to handle stress. This, Varma says, had a huge impact. It also launched a wellness app for employees, which provided access to health resources offering information on screen time, sleep cycles, nutrition, and mental and physical well-being. Amazon also launched two new leadership principles then. The first was to “Strive to be the Earth’s Best Employer” which encouraged leaders to lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. The second was “Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility”; it reminds leaders to be humble and thoughtful about even the secondary effects of their actions and be accountable to local communities, the planet, and future generations.

Then there are initiatives like a launch pad for women who have taken a break in their careers and a platform for employees to recognise the work of their colleagues.

Amazon is using science to make the lives of its employees easier, tough times or not.

@binu_t_paul