Partnership Accounting - Assignment Example

? An investigation identifying the causes of high staff turnover in Amazon Contents Contents 2 Introduction 3 Literature Review 3 Review Findings 4 Research Objective 5 Research Methodology 6 Research Design 6 Sampling Strategy 7 Methodology 7 Schedule of Research 9 Analysis of the data 9 Conclusion 11 References 13 Appendix: Research Questionnaire 15 Introduction Amazon is the leading e-commerce organisation based in the United States. The company was founded in the year 1994. The company has a global presence and caters to almost all the countries of the world. The company has employee strength of 109 thousand employees as in 2013. Since it is an e-retail company there is requirement for technical as well as staff for supply chain. The company has to depend on the competitive intelligence in form of the consumer data so that the company is being able to understand the needs of the consumers through their browsing history and can stock up their inventory levels as and when required. Thus it is important for the company to have a combination of a good retail supply chain workforce and as technical people who would be available with the company to support the technical aspects of the operations. However the turnover for Amazon is very high. Most of the employees do not stay in the organisation for more than one year. This report is an attempt to find out the reasons for such high rate of turnover. The basis for the study is mainly primary as well as secondary research. The section of the literature review explores the studies that have been made by the authors about this issue of turnover in the business environment. Literature Review The topic of employee turnover has been studies and researched by a huge number of scholars over a very long period of time. In the Human resources framework, the rate of turnover of the employees is the rate at which an employer acquires his employees and loses the employees. The high rate of turnover is an indication of the fact that the employees in an organisation would work in the organisation for a shorter span of time. This is generally a rate that is determined after comparing in the other industries playing in the same market. The turnover metric is determined by dividing the total number of parting workers who have left within a year by the number of employees who were engaged in the company for that particular year (Cascio and Boudreau, 2011, p. 80). The same metric has been used by Price in his modelling of turnover (Price, 1977, pp. 10-25). For a particular labour market there are about the same number of employees that rotate around in the different markets. Most of the management practitioners have argued that there are several reasons that contribute to the turnover rate of the companies (Kevin, Joan and Adrian, 2004, pp. 161-166). The event of turnover is time consuming and the management of a company cannot officially stop an employee from leaving the organisation. In most cases the employees are lured away by other organisations operating in the same industry by offering a higher salary. However, it has been found out through intensive research that the employees cite this reason only to disguise some other major reason for which they leave the organisation. Review Findings There are several other reasons for which an employee decides to leave an organisation. Job related stress is one of the causes which contribute to the high rate of turnover among the employees. The level of satisfaction in a particular job is also another major reason for the high rate of turnover. Most of the employees remain dissatisfied with the work that they perform and they feel that it does not meet their self actualisation needs fully. Research has also shown that the level of compensation that the employees get from their present employer is not satisfactory or the perquisites are not up to the industry standards. This forces the employees to shift to a new organisation. On the other hand, in case of mostly the manufacturing organisations or the companies that involves jobs that would expose the employees to a variety of risks, the employees leave because they find the working conditions unhealthy or hazardous (Baron and Greenberg, 2008, pp. 24-39). The companies on the other hand may have their own attrition policies and may decide to downsize from time to time. There may be a variety of reasons which might vary across the departments for the attrition of the employees. For example a company serving in the financial software services may not require the previous set of employees due to introduction or a new technology. It may also happen that the new technology that is being implemented would not require the same amount of manpower as it did previously with the old technology. The companies may also fire an employee if he or she is not being able to the deliver the services as was expected from him. The death or the incapability of an employee to work anymore would also add to the rate of turnover (Booth and Hamer, 2007, pp. 289-307). Thus it is important to understand if the phenomenon of turnover is a voluntary or an involuntary one. It would be voluntary if the employee by choice leaves the organisation and moves to another organisation. Alternatively it would be involuntary turnover if the organisation forcefully makes an employee resign. The Unfolding Model is a theory that moves away from the conservative thinking about the employee turnover. Thus turnover is considered to be a phenomenon that occurs due to the changes in the decision making of the employees (Griffeth, Hom and Gaertner, 2000, pp. 463-88). The employers have to incur a lot of cost for the replacement of the employees. This is because with every employee recruited there is a cost of training and development as well as recruitment cost. Therefore it is clear that there are a host of issues that add to the high rate of attrition in the organisation and Research Objective The objective of this research is to find out the issues that have contributed to the high rate of turnover in the company of Amazon. This is done to point out the areas where the company is not being ethical or does not conform to the general practise done by the other organisations. A sample of the employees of the U.K. business of Amazon has been taken so that the problems that the sample encounters in their day to day activities can provide a holistic idea about the general problem of the organisation in regard to employee turnover. Research Methodology A scientific research method has been adopted for getting correct and indicative results out of the study conducted for the issues relating to Amazon. Research Design A proper research design would allow the researcher to structure the entire process of research in a step by step manner so as to draw meaningful conclusion from the study conducted. In order to understand the opinion of the internal work process of Amazon and the reasons for the high level of attrition 5 ex-employees from the different departments of the UK division of has been interviewed who had once worked for the organisation. A proper questionnaire has been injected into these people and the responses have been recorded. The compilation of the resources would help in the determination of the reasons for the high level of turnover. The research method is of the exploratory research because the study looks for the reasons for the high rate of turnover in Amazon in the UK divisions. This means that this process of research would try to look for the evidences that would prove the position of the researcher. The study is a cross sectional study because it considers the employees who have left the organisation in the span of the last 2 years. Thus it captures the feature of the organisation from the perspective of the employees who have worked in Amazon for a definite time frame. The method that is taken in this particular study is the qualitative method. The responses have been analysed qualitatively at the end of the research. The interview method would be a face to face interview with the ex-employees. Since all the employees considered in the sample have left the organisation they are quite open to the interviewee for their responses (Cooper and Schindler, 2006, pp. 136-161). The sample that has been collected is a small sample survey due to time constraint in the period of the research. Sampling Strategy A random sampling method has been adopted for carrying out the survey. The information of the past employees has been found from the employee portals. A number of employees were screened who had worked in the organisation for the particular time frame. Out of these a random sample of five employees has been taken in the survey method. In the simple random sampling, the five respondents are the representative of the entire population of the people considered for the survey (Deming, 1990, pp. 23-31). Methodology The questionnaire constructed in the way to capture the different variables that are concerned with the issue. Though the questions that have been asked are the dichotomous type, they are basically open ended which has provided the respondents with a lot of flexibility. They can state more than what is asked in the questions. The initial questions act like the warm ups which are comparatively easy for the respondents to answer. As the questions progress the level of difficulty increases (Mellenbergh, 2008, pp. 235–268). The questionnaire is administered face to face. Appointment with the ex-employees is made and they are orally asked and the responses are noted down by the interviewer. These responses are compiled and the redundancy in the data is cleaning with the use of specific techniques. Finally the responses are analysed to answer the research question. Schedule of Research Wk 1 Wk 2 Wk3 Wk 4 Wk5 Wk6 Wk7 Wk8 Wk9 Wk 10 Research Question formulation Research Design Collection of the information about the employees Contacting the employees Administering the Questionnaire Compilation and Analysis of the Responses Consolidation Analysis of the data The main source of the data that has been collected for the survey is the responses. Each of the questions for the five employees have been analysed one by one in this section of the report. The five employees have provided the tenures for which they have stayed in the organisation. While the highest among them is 1 year 2 months the least tenure would be 6 months. The median tenure found out from the survey is 8 months. This proves that the company has a high turnover because a company generally makes a human resources planning with an aim to retain an employee at least for the forthcoming couple of financial years. But in case of Amazon such manpower planning is not valid because most of the employees do not stay there even for one fiscal year. The employees who have been interviewed were a mix from different departments. There retail managers, inventory attendant, analyst for the customer demands as well as engineers from the technical departments. There are a variety of reasons that the employees in the UK division has shown. First of all the inventory and the retail manager considered that they had to work in the extremes of temperature inside the warehouses. Thus the employees would very easily fall sick. This had adverse effects on the long term health of the employees. Thus they preferred to work in such places in which their health and safety issues would be addressed. On the other hand the analyst and the technical employees were of the opinion that they were not happy with the work hours in which they used to deliver their services. It also had negative effects on their health. Almost all the employees were of the opinion that they were not happy with the remuneration that they received from Amazon. They felt that the other organisations playing in the retail industry paid greater salary and hence they found it better to leave Amazon and join elsewhere. The employees said that they received training for the job that they performed but it was mainly on the job training. No separate training programme was provided to them as a new entrant. Some of the respondents even mentioned that on the job training is the chief norm of the organisation and they consider separate training programmes for the employees to be costly because the rate of turnover is extremely high (Mento, Steel and Karren, 1987, pp. 52-83). Regarding the relationship with the immediate superior with the employees there were differences in opinion across the departments. While the employees of the retail division considered that there were less power distance and they could interact and provide feedback to their immediate seniors, the power distance was high in the technical and the analyst divisions of the company. The seniors of the retail and inventory divisions however were less capable of influencing the management as compared to the technical and the support divisions. This means that the problems that the employees faced in the organisation were never addressed in the proper manner. For the 7th question all the respondents provided a similar answer. The employees were of the opinion that there was no attempt on part of the company to stop the employees because this phenomenon was quite common for Amazon. In the final question the employees again provided the same answer that they would not want to come back to the organisation even if they were provided with any better offer. This shows that all the employees considered in the survey had left the organization with a negative impression and was having the same opinion about Amazon even at present when they were working somewhere else. Conclusion The studies thus conducted through the primary survey have supported the literatures that have been studied in the initial part of the report. From the above analysis it is clear that Amazon has several issues with their HR policies and there is immediate requirement for the organisation to review and restructure their employee retention and other HR policies. There are several ethical issues that are also involved in this case. The employees are forced to work in adverse temperatures and work environment and also for odd hours. This goes against the regulatory policies of UK regarding the labour laws and norms. Along with that it is also unethical on part of the organisation to force the employees to work in such cases ignoring their health and safety. Again the company does not take enough measures to retain the employees and has an exploitative attitude toward the employees. Therefore there is necessity for the HR department to motivate the employees in a way that would help to have job satisfaction. Along with that the health and the safety of the employees have to be ensured by conducting regular checks and audits of the places of work. Training and orientation programmes have to be done from time to time to retain the employees in the organisation for a longer span of time. References Cascio, W. and Boudreau, J. W., 2011. Investing in People: Financial Impact of Human Resource Initiatives. New Jersey: FT Press. Kevin, M.M., Joan, L.C. and Adrian J.W., 2004. “Organizational change and employee turnover.” Personnel Review, Vol. 33 (2), pp. 161-166. Price, J. L., 1977. The study of turnover. Iowa: Iowa State University Press. Booth, S. and Hamer, K., 2007. “Labour turnover in the retail industry.” The International Journal of Retail Distribution Management, Vol. 35 (4), pp. 289-307 Griffeth, R.W., Hom P. W. and Gaertner S., 2000. "A meta-analysis of antecedents and correlates of employee turnover: update, moderator tests, and research implications for the next millennium". Journal of Management, Vol., 26 (3), pp. 463-88. Cooper, D. R. and Schindler, P. S., 2006. Business Research Methods. New York: McGraw-Hill Irwin. Deming, W. E., 1990. Sample Design in Business Research. New York: John Wiley and Sons. Mellenbergh, G. J., 2008. Advising on research methods: A consultant's companion. Huizen: Johannes van Kessel Publishing. Baron, R. A. and Greenberg, J., 2008. Behavior in organizations. New Jersey: Pearson Education Inc. Mento, A. J., Steel, R. P. and Karren, R. J., 1987. “A meta-analytic study of the effects of goal setting on task performance: 1966-1984.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Vol. 39(1), pp. 52-83. Appendix: Research Questionnaire 1. What was the tenure of experience in Amazon? 2. What was your position when you worked in Amazon? 3. What was the reason for your leaving the organisation? 4. Were you satisfied with the remuneration that you got in Amazon? 5. Did you get any on the job training? 6. What was your relation with your immediate superior in the organisation? 7. Did the company take any measure for stopping you from leaving Amazon? 8. Would you ever want to work for Amazon again? Read More