- What do you think is the most demotivating part of Harper’s job?
- The most demotivating part of Harper’s job is that she’s contributing and exerting more work into her position for the same amount of benefits as before. After her previous boss left, she was unable to balance her work life and personal life. Therefore, causing unnecessary stress from the workload that is not receiving enough recognition. Furthermore, while David understands and is attentive to the stress Harper deals with, he still decides to prioritize other employees and chooses not to be available. This, I believe, would be a big demotivator as well since she actively seeks help; however, she still doesn’t receive any from David.
- If you were an HR manager meeting with Harper’s supervisor, David, what advice would you give to help them re-engage Harper?
- Creating a culture of open communication will be the best strategy to help re-engage employees with their supervisors and build a more robust and happier work life. The ability to communicate, share ideas, and freely talk one’s mind out will help instigate a better work environment because Harper will discuss and negotiate her wants/needs with David without sacrificing his priorities. Since she’s stressed because she’s exerting more energy into a higher workload, she could discuss this problem with David, and they could negotiate more benefits for Harper. This simple strategy will increase employee satisfaction and maintain a happy work environment.
- What would be the downside of losing Harper as an employee?
- Harper is a powerful employee of the company. She’s a significant asset in the marketing department, and losing her will mean the company losing more resources in the long term. Harper’s a significant asset due to her experience and working in the company for four years. Losing Harper will mean the company will need to sacrifice money and time to find another employee with the same knowledge and experience as Harper. Moreover, if they find a new employee, the new employee will need months of training and time to adapt to the environment. Nevertheless, giving Harper slightly more benefits with the extra workload she already has will not be too costly for the company in the long term.
Author Archives: Antonio Sugirin
Amazon’s Corporate Ethical and Social Responsibility
A company I interact with regularly is Amazon. Amazon’s a multinational e-commerce technology company that provides a streaming service and e-commerce platform that sells various products through the internet and physical stores. The company is the number one most visited and used e-commerce platform for its availability and reliability when buying and selling products on the platform. Available in over 100 countries, Amazon has provided customers with safe and reliable transactions ever since the start of e-commerce culture. Amongst many other top multinational companies, Amazon is known to undermine and disregard its corporate social responsibility and transparency, which causes the company to receive backlash from critics and customers. To this day, Amazon is under scrutiny for its noncompliance to environmental sustainability, employee rights, community outreach programs, etc. In this essay, I will dig into Amazon’s issues regarding its ethics and social responsibility.
Over the years, Amazon is widely believed to have invested considerable amounts of money and time into its Corporate Social Responsibility programs. However, recent reports during the COVID-19 crisis states otherwise. Adverse reports regarding the environmental working conditions at Amazon warehouses have increased during the pandemic. Amazon lowered its prioritization towards employee safety and stuck to its goal, and focused on customer satisfaction. While on the surface, this does seem beneficial, amazon employees get fired regularly for “demanding adequate protection for warehouse workers during the pandemic.” However, after receiving backlash from critics and the general public, Amazon implemented roughly 150 process changes to protect its warehouse employees by increasing their COVID-19 testing and offering more significant compensation to its frontline employees. With these changes towards the working conditions, Amazon has still been under scrutiny for disregarding many other aspects of their social and ethical responsibilities.
Ethically, Amazon still does not care nor try to change their goals for the safety of the employees as they keep working on tight schedules and long hours. Amazon’s goal has always been to satisfy the customers and sacrifice anything to keep customers satisfied and loyal to their business. The CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has always acknowledged these problems regarding the tight schedules and ethical working conditions but disregards any other process changes (besides the COVID-19 testing and financial compensation) and decides to “unveil robotic plans to keep the employees working.” Unlike other big companies, Amazon has never been transparent with the public regarding working conditions which is the sole reason for their high customer loyalty to the business. Part of the reason the company has kept this goal was due to the high demand working standards. An article by The Verge states that “workers lacked the permission for bathroom breaks and were forced to pee in bottles while simultaneously
working to meet their daily demands.” Furthermore, many of Amazon’s employees quit the company weekly as they are not compensated for their hard work and dedication to keep up with the high demands. From this, Amazon has not changed a single aspect of their company so long as it takes in revenue and keeps up with its high customer loyalty and satisfaction.
“We are humans, not robots!” protested a group of Amazon warehouse employees in Minnesota. Throughout the years, Amazon has lacked the corporate social responsibility to treat their workers as regular employees. With the advancement of technology, instead of employing its technological capabilities in the workforce by doing the physical work. It is used to dehumanize the work demands of employees and create a more exhausting work environment. Amazon’s technology has employed a work pace with an almost robotic-like structure forcing workers to complete tasks efficiently and on time. All work in the Amazon warehouses is monitored, controlled, and timed. If tasks were not completed on time, workers were given 18 minutes of overtime to complete their tasks. If the tasks were not completed even with the extra time, the employees would be getting less pay by the end of the month. In an interview with Time magazine, an Amazon warehouse employee stated, “After I completed a task, the scan gun not only immediately gave me a new one but also started counting down the second I had left to do it. This shows how Amazon treats their employees like robots and dehumanizes the work environment even after “trying” to employ a safer working environment.
With all that being said, I have several recommendations for Amazon to create a safe, ethical, and socially responsible environment for the business. First, Amazon should change its goals and priorities to make sure that it keeps its customer loyalty while creating a safe and ethical environment for its workers. Over the years, Amazon has already built a significant reputation for being a fast, efficient, and reliable e-commerce platform to buy and sell products. Even if there is a slight change in working conditions, customers will be loyal to the company. For me, since I’m a regular customer of Amazon, I wouldn’t necessarily care if packages took slightly longer to arrive at my doorstep since I know the package will arrive safely. Suppose amazon slightly sacrificed delivery times with safer working conditions. It will benefit both the customers and the workers as the business will keep up with its corporate social responsibility, and workers will also stay in the company. Second, Amazon should use its technological capabilities to enforce a more accessible working environment for its employees. As I stated before, Amazon uses its technology to monitor and time their employees – which dehumanizes the working environment as they are paced for each task. Instead, I suggest Amazon use their technology to do more physical work, and the employees can control this technology for the same efficiency they had if humans did all the work. Not only will the working efficiency be the same, if not more, it will also reduce the physical stress the employees will need to go through while working long hours in the warehouses. Lastly, Amazon should treat their employees to more breaks and a better community with less restrictive work. Amazon does not treat its warehouse employees like a community, leading to an unhappy working environment. Treating workers like this is highly unethical as they are restricted from socialization and are forced to keep up with the pace. This workplace practice is somewhat common and leads to painful conditions which lead to an unhappy lifestyle. I suggest that Amazon treat the workers fairly and enforce a community amongst all the workers, so they can work without being repressed by the workload.
Nevertheless, with all these arguments stated, Amazon is not a perfect company. Although it is in the top 10 globally, it still receives criticism daily for its inability to keep up with corporate social responsibility and unethical practices. With the criticism and suggestions stated previously, I believe that Amazon could be a mere perfect company with high customer loyalty while also treating its employees like humans and creating a happier working environment. Even though I am still an avid user of Amazon’s e-commerce platform, company secrets like these often stir me away from regularly using their platform again.
Sources:
https://www.thomasnet.com/articles/other/amazon-csr-sustainability/
https://time.com/5629233/amazon-warehouse-employee-treatment-robots/
The Founder
- Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers are different in many ways. Ray Kroc is driven, motivated and persistent. He strives for success and doesn’t care what goes in his way to create an empire and make money. On the other hand, Dick and Mac McDonald were wise and humble brothers who started a family business in San Bernardino to cater to the families in the city. They believed creating good food in a family-friendly environment was all that mattered. They did not strive to make profits in the local business, nor were they persistent and driven to franchise outside of San Bernardino. Ray is an intelligent and charismatic individual that strives to network and build connections amongst other individuals. Ray prefers to exit his comfort zone if it means he will be successful in the end. Meanwhile, the McDonald brothers prefer to settle with what they already have instead of building an empire.
- I believe the brothers did the right thing initially by selling out and partnering with Ray. They had a transparent contract and agreement with Ray, which they firmly believed could not be exploited while running the partnership together. However, signs further on showed Ray was just in it for the money instead of the partnership. In the middle of the agreement, he tells the brothers that they are in safe hands and will be running the franchising operation outside of San Bernardino. With all the efforts in Ray’s hands, he created a fast-food empire all by himself but decided it wasn’t enough and took the name of the company and 100% of the ownership to himself. Although, I can agree that Ray was overboard, asking for a 4% cut instead of 1.9%. The brothers were already at a 0.5% cut. While, in my perspective, Ray is a horrible and greedy individual, he took an idea that was never going to grow if he wasn’t a part of it. Without him, McDonald’s would have never franchised into a national empire. The brothers squandered the potential of their company. With that said, I feel that the brothers should’ve known what was going to happen. They knew Ray Kroc personally, and they should’ve understood what would happen if he took over and franchised the company. From what I believe, the deal he asked for was a good deal, albeit greedy and selfish. They let a persistent and motivated individual run the company from a family business to a multimillion-dollar empire.
- The McDonald’s brother’s local restaurant made money because many ideas made their franchise stand out from other fast-food restaurants. They chose a family-friendly location, had a simple 3 item menu with cheap yet tasty food, a clean environment, plastic wrap instead of costly silverware, and most importantly, a fast and efficient food cooking system. The system the brothers developed was called the” Speedee Service System.” They created this system because they prioritized speed and quality. As mentioned by Dick McDonald, “orders are ready in 30 seconds, not 30 minutes”. Furthermore, they cut expenses significantly by using a walk-in system instead of having extra employees bring food to the customer’s cars.
- Ray Kroc made money because of an individual he met outside of the bank. Harry J. Sonneborn was a businessman that showed Ray that it wasn’t about the food; it was about the land. Sonneborn convinced Ray that he wasn’t dealing with the food industry; he was operating the real estate. Soon he co-founded a real estate company, without the brothers’ permission, to buy land and lease more locations to generate more revenue. Ray inundates the word “persistent,” which describes his personality. His persistence led him to create a real estate company with money as a main priority. This was entirely different from the McDonald’s brother’s local business as they made money by keeping control of one location, which often created a steady revenue or a break-even.
- Yes, it changed my view of McDonald’s. To the point where I’ll start second-guessing ever ordering food from their chain again. It’s also making me second guess whether I’d want to commit to having the corporate lifestyle when I’m older. All these schemes, scams, and stolen ideas have made me realize that the real world of business is much crueler than I have ever expected. The entire movie shows that, even with a drive and motivation to succeed, most will do undesirable actions to get what they want in life, even if these actions are unethical and could ruin another individual’s life.
Antonio Sugirin
My name is Antonio Sugirin and my major is Business Finance. My hobbies as of now are skateboarding and cooking. I am very fond of the financial industry which is why I am taking this course. Here’s my BMCC email: MOHAMAD.SUGIRIN001@stu.bmcc.cuny.edu
