Evaluation Of Current IHRM Policies And Practices For Amazon Inc. Essay.

Discuss about the an Evaluation of the Current IHRM Policies and Practices.

There was a time HRM (Human Resource Management) was considered as a support function in the organization. With time HRM has emerged as a critical function. The emphasis on HRM has further increased as the organizations have started to expand in the international market. In today’s competitive business world, companies are largely seeking for ways to secure their competitive position as most of the rivals easily copy competitive advantages (i.e. low cost or differentiation) within a very short period of time. Having identified this, most of the firms focus on developing sustainable HR strategies, which can be hardly replicated by industry competition. For most of the firms, human capital has been the critical success factor, which helped them to reach greater heights. Google, Facebook, Microsoft etc. provide fine examples within this context. Thus, spending on employee recruitment and development should be considered as an investment, which accelerate business growth and sustainability (Bansal, 2015). When it comes to recruitment, there are different strategies followed by different firms and these are highly context dependent. Firms need to consider the nature of the business, type of the vacancy, recruitment costs, quality of the expected recruits, relative importance of the vacant position, etc. before taking any recruitment decisions.

With the difficulty in the recruitment process in international environment and the difficulty to manage the resources in global environment, there has been a push to the concept of international human resource management. By definition, “international Human resource management is the process of procuring allocating and effectively utilizing the human resources in a multinational corporation” (Conway & Monks, 2017). The objective of this paper is to discuss the concept of International Human Resource Management for Amazon Inc. The paper would discuss the two IHRM concepts of international recruitment and performance management. A brief organizational background can be discussed as:

Amazon is a known brand of e-commerce in different companies. It is a multinational company that operates in different parts of the world. The company has close to 3,41,000 employees. These employees are spread over more than 100 countries. This scale in itself speaks about the importance of international human resource management for Amazon. The management of Amazon believes that Employees are the most valuable resource in a business and they should be recruited with a great responsibility using well-streamlined and globally accepted procedures (Podsiadlowski & Groschke, 2013). Blindly benchmarking competitor recruitment strategies can be detrimental for the growth of the business as organizational culture can be significantly different among firms. Thus, recruitment strategies followed by competitors may work within their organizational climate, but can generate poor results if you used by some other firms. The paper would analyze the international recruitment strategy and performance management system for Amazon.

Evaluation of current IHRM practices for Amazon

It is important to mention that Amazon has a strong human resource management system in place. The evaluation of current international human resource management practices of Amazon can be discussed as:

Nowadays, recruitment is the first process, which makes the relationship with employers and employees in the company, and it helps organizations to understand candidates and give them training in specific time to achieve the goal. The biggest issue of workforce composition for Amazon is cultural challenges. It is not easy for new generation workers to work with the people from different culture.  The leaders and management of Amazon realizes the importance of human resource management function. The company has a central HRM team that manages the local HR operations across its various locations. The two key functions of international human resource management of Amazon can be discussed as:

If organizations follow the same dull recruitment process chances are that they might not be able to attract the right candidates. For example, there could be many talented candidates in other firms who are happy with their jobs and may not even look at job adverts published on various recruitment sites.

The management of Amazon has realized that they need to draft the job descriptions and specifications appropriately in order to identify the right capabilities and recruit the right fit to achieve their ultimate objectives. However, it need to keep in mind that the potential employees are a resource to Amazon and the company can grasp the most out of them to achieve higher revenue and profits. Thus, Amazon need to change the traditional methods of shortlisting candidates based on resumes only and takes a different approach other than job adverts to attracting the talent in the market. Alternatively, for the senior positions, Amazon can look at internal recruitment as evidence shows it is less costly to retain employees rather than recruit externally. Plus the existing employees are well aware of Amazon’s culture and work practices, which mean the company, can save time and cost on training (Deadrick & Stone, 2015).

As the company grown, Amazon has more focused on cost competitiveness. There is a shortage of qualified engineers in the e-commerce industry. Every engineer needs skills and competencies to do work in Amazon. Job description for each vacancy has four parameters such as skills, knowledge, behaviors and expectations. The internal recruitment process would have more attention on the practicality of the candidate. It must focused on evidence-based.

International recruitment

Arguinis (2013) defines the process of performance management as “the encouraging relationship between a trainer/coach/tutor and an employee, working jointly with the aim of achieving optimal performance”. The performance management process can be used to communicate the objectives and goals of an organization, to reiterate the accountability of the employees to meeting these goals and to evaluate and track the performance of the employees and organization as a whole. It portrays the relationship in which the team leader or manager avails employees with the opportunity to contribute to the organization. Performance management process is a well-defined process for managing employees, which results to success for the employees and the organization as well (Cadwell, 2000).

As effective as the process of performance management is, it also has some of its limitations/challenges it encounters. One of the challenges that can be encountered is having a wrong design (Cadwell, 2000). The performance management system and process has to align with the specific needs of the organization in order to plan effectively. There ought to be a consultation between the stakeholders (employees and managers) of how the processes will be executed.

The management of Amazon believes in one on one and personal interaction to measure the performance of employees. There are clear tensions between trying to use one interview to make decisions on reward whilst also trying to identify areas of weakness. This is of course because employees are very unlikely to have an open conversation about their weaknesses when they are anxious to highlight their strengths to pursue a bigger bonus. Roberts, (2002) contends that participating employee in performance appraisal can enhance work-related independent, an essential prerequisite for employee growth. Intrinsic motivational approaches have evidently maintained communication trust and confidence in employee’s performance.

One of the key aspects of performance management system for Amazon is documentation. Regarding this, Latham (2014) explain that employee performance problems are often caused by failings and shortcomings by the manager which (i) do not strictly follow the procedure; (ii) do not provide proper orientation and training to the employee; and (iii) left the employees to resolve work related issues alone or with teammates guidance. For this particular case of a dismissal based on a performance problem, documentation would include copies of counseling sessions and other discussions as well as copies of any performance improvement plans and subsequent follow-up activities (Pudelko & Reiche, 2015). As stated by Pudelko & Reiche (2015), "if it is not documented, it never happened". What is observed nowadays is many shortcuts are being done; other contexts rationalize the use of e-mails as source of documentation. However, there are sensitive views about the excessive documentation and email exchange which can also be viewed as “intimidation” for the employees as it would be used as a fact in the future. The documentation of the performance review and assessment can provide the managers with a tool to remember the important positive and negative feedback and use it for administration decision such as salary increment, bonus, incentives, training and development, promotion, dismissal and corrective action. “Documentation of performance review can save organization thousands of dollars and headaches when it comes to disciplining employees” (Lyster and Arthur, 2007).

Performance Management

The effectiveness that Amazon has experienced through Performance Management derives in the approach as a result of interactions not limited to process steps but instead is ongoing. Before the change, employees reported that the PMS was disconnected to their daily work, that feedback was rather seen as a must-do and that the whole PM was seen as an ‘administrative drill’. One year after the change 85% reported that there were continuous discussions between employees and managers and that useful feedback was provided when it was helpful. It might be a good idea to overthink the concept of PM as a process and see it rather see it an attitude that must be implemented in corporate life.

Conclusion

The above paper discusses the international human resource management function for Amazon. The paper discusses the functions of international recruitment and performance management for Amazon. Generally, in business, production and marketing are considered as the primary business functions and HR is just a supportive function. In the presence of a great leadership, HR is just common sense and if rightly monitored, any firm could generate excellent results with their workforce. When the companies grow in size, a formal HR department should be there to facilitate administrative procedures, but HR has a lesser strategic relevance in the business of engineering consultancy, as it does not directly contribute for the profitability of the business or ROI. Having identified this, all costs associated to HR should be carefully decided and competitor benchmarking is a great way of doing that. Benchmarking the recruitment strategies used by key competitors will deliberately reduce the risk of attracting wrong candidates and it will reduce the recruitment costs in a great deal. If we want to try some different recruitment strategies, it has to be well justified and there’s a huge risk involved, as no one has ever tried that before.

The key recommendation for Amazon is that Recruitment process should be non-identical so as to segregate our organisation from others. As a result, this recruiting process may become useful for all and can achieve satisfactory level with ethics and norms. This is how recruiting process should be owned at Amazon. It can be said that it is not a sensible method to follow our competitors’ approaches in recruitment. When we look at the growth of Amazon and the numbers, we forget sometimes, that the important factor behind those numbers are the employees, the employees work hard to achieve these numbers and the success of our company will depend on how we look at recruitment. It is also recommended that Amazon should also have strong strategy in place for change management. The industry is a dynamic industry and the focus on change management would help Amazon to have a tight control over its human resource management strategies

References

Aguinis, H. (2013). Performance management. 3^rd Edition. Upper Saddle River, N.J: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Bansal, A.A., 2015. 21st Century Workforce: Challenges for human resource. International Journal of Research in IT and Management, 5(6), pp.30-35.

Conway, E. and Monks, K., 2017. Designing a HR System for Managing an Age-Diverse Workforce: Challenges and Opportunities. In The Palgrave Handbook of Age Diversity and Work (pp. 585-606). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Cadwell, C. (2000). Performance management. New York: American Management Association.

Lyster, S. and Arthur, A. (2007) 199 Pre-written Employee Performance Appraisals: The Complete Guide to Successful Employee Evaluations and Documentation?: with Companion CD-ROM. Atlantic Publishing Company. Available at: https://books.google.com/books?id=MCERIRkajXUC&pgis=1 (Accessed: 25^th  April 2015).

Latham, J.R., 2014. Leadership for quality and innovation: Challenges, theories, and a framework for future research. Quality Management Journal, 21 (1), 5.

Podsiadlowski, A., Groschke, D., Kogler, M., Springer, C. and Van Der Zee, K., 2013. Managing a culturally diverse workforce: Diversity perspectives in organizations. International Journal of Intercultural Relations, 37(2), pp.159-175.

Pudelko, M., Reiche, B.S. and Carr, C., 2015. Recent developments and emerging challenges in international human resource management.

Roberts, G.E.(2002)‘Employee Performance Appraisal System Participation: A Technique That Works’, Public Personnel Management. Vol.31 (3), pp.333-342.

Stone, D.L. and Deadrick, D.L., 2015. Challenges and opportunities affecting the future of human resource management. Human Resource Management Review, 25(2), pp.139-145.