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Vol 1, Issue 04, Nov 2019
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Human Resource Mgmt.
The case discusses the grueling working conditions in the warehouses of the online retail giant, Amazon.com, Inc. The case discusses the stringent delivery targets given to the delivery drivers which resulted in several of them not taking toilet breaks. The case goes on to discuss the alleged low level of wages paid to the company’s workers. The wages in some cases were so low that some of the workers in the UK were forced to live in tents near the warehouses to avoid paying private transporters for conveyance. In the US, the inadequacy of Amazon’s wages could be gauged from the several number of its workers who were dependent on state assistance. The case details the pressure brought on Amazon by, among others, Senator Bernie Sanders to increase its wages. The company seemed to have budged when it raised the hourly wage rates of its workers in the US and the UK. Observers, however, were disappointed with Amazon doing away with stock option grants and variable compensation pay. The case raises the question of how Amazon, which was one of the world’s most valuable companies in terms of market capitalization, could be forced to improve the working conditions of its workers and whether consumers had a role to play in bringing about a positive change.
Amazon.com, Inc. and the Human Cost of Fast Shipping
Compose Inc. (Compose), a database-as-a-service startup that offered cloud hosted, fully managed database services, found that the conventional approach to hiring mainly from internal sources such as referrals from friends and trusted acquaintances, consumed a lot of time, besides which the percentage of candidates who made it to the interview stage was minimal. The company wanted to make the hiring process more transparent, less subjective, and less biased. Compose introduced the blind hiring approach in its hiring process that comprised the application and work sample and work-a-day stages. Compose moved a step further and discarded Fizz for Interviewed, a third-party application. This helped the company not only to automate all the stages of the hiring but further streamlined the process. The new application had a dashboard function where statistics once requiring a week-long analysis were collected, organized, and presented automatically in real-time for the HR team.
Automating Blind Hiring at Compose Inc.
Xerox Corporation was often listed among the Fortune 500 companies because of the quality of its products, customer satisfaction, leadership, and corporate responsibility. The company attributed its success to its employees and valued them as its greatest asset. Xerox provided its employees with a variety of flexible work arrangements based on feasibility, including remote, part-time, temporary, and short-term jobs. Xerox launched the Virtual Office Program in 2013 and by 2018 more than 8,000 employees in the US alone (11% of the domestic workforce) were working remotely 100% of the time. The roles covered job functions such as customer care, tech support, data entry/verification, image tagging, quality control, systems development, software programming, and administrative/business support. Due to the diversity of job roles and geographic distances, Xerox’s Virtual Office Program faced some challenges related to work supervision, authority-responsibility contexts, and performance management. To deal with these challenges better, the company improved its technology infrastructure in partnership with Cisco. This helped the employees to collaborate from anywhere with their colleagues, partners, and customers, using secure voice and video conferencing applications, versatile messaging tools, and mobility services. Xerox’s virtual office program helped the company rank high in terms of workplace satisfaction and employee motivation. Xerox also expanded this program to include veterans and military spouses. Through its Heroes@Home program, Xerox hired qualified veterans and military spouses for at-home employment opportunities.
Telecommuting at Xerox – The Future of Work is Here!
 
 
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