Background
Introduction to Organization
Amazon is a retail store founded in 1994 by Jeff Bezos. The company was initially an online bookstore but has since diversified to selling almost everything online. Amazon had grown to be among the world's most widespread online stores, with the number of users and subscribers exceeding 310 million and 100 million, respectively (Gupta, 2020). As of February 2021, Amazon was the leading online retail store with a market cap of $1.65 trillion, a yearly income of $386 billion, plus net earnings of about $ 210 billion (Gupta, 2020). As of December 2020, Amazon had a workforce of 1,298,000 people whom the company expects to implement its growth strategies (Sabanoglu, 2021). Amazon's firm brand name has attracted many customers and positioned it as a global e-commerce pacesetter.
Situational Analysis
Externally, Amazon has a competitive advantage since it has the largest merchandise selection in the online retail market and hence attracts diverse customers from across the world. Amazon has been experiencing increasing sales thanks to its large number of third-party sellers and local strategies with local companies. The local strategy has enabled Amazon to compete with domestic e-commerce competitors as the company understands local needs and customer culture. The company has also acquired other large stores such as Whole Foods, Junglee, Woot, Zappos, and IMBD (Gupta, 2020). Internally, Amazon has improved its workforce's productivity by setting the minimum pay per hour to 15 dollars. Amazon’s minimum pay per hour is higher compared to other e-commerce companies like Target with $12, Walmart with $11, and Costco with $14 (Gupta, 2020). Besides, Amazon has succeeded in creating customer-oriented strategies to meet customer preferences and tastes, creating customer loyalty (Simons, 2014). Essentially, Amazon has been thriving after enacting differentiation and innovation strategies that have strengthened its brand name.
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Need for a New Communication Plan
From Amazon’s SWOT analysis of 2020, the company’s primary strength is its massive market capitalization of over $1 trillion and its robust logistics and distribution systems. Amazon facilitates reliable, fast, and secure delivery of products worldwide to meet customer demands (Gupta, 2020). Amazon's weaknesses include its easily imitable operational model, a decline in customer safety, employee unrest, overdependence on local distributors, and product failures in the market. Retail competitors have capitalized on Amazon's weaknesses and closed the competitive gap, which heaped massive pressure on Amazon to minimize its weaknesses. However, Amazon has an opportunity to penetrate the developing markets and expand its physical stores across the world. Besides, the company has a chance to improve its policies to minimize counterfeit sales that reduce income and risk its brand. Nevertheless, Amazon is at risk of controversies involving avoidance of taxes and illegal use of third-party data (Gupta, 2020). The company has also been accused of labor exploitation and has been under investigation from the United States State Department, which has risked its reputation as an e-commerce giant.
Current Internal Communication Efforts
Regardless of Amazon's successful internal and external strategies, the company's internal communication plans need to be advanced to meet modern employee wants and minimize employee unrest. According to Dimar et al. (2016), Amazon applies a command-and-control internal communication strategy. Externally, Amazon has been accused of withholding crucial information and only communicating through its sites. The command-and-control communication system has led to employee dissatisfaction and conflicts that have severally resulted in strikes and boycotts. Besides, Amazon's internal communication plan is a top-down approach that limits the role of employees in decision-making, even on matters that affect them directly. In many cases, employees have expressed dissatisfaction for being sanctioned for failing to follow communication guidelines set by the organization in the absence of the employees’ representatives.
Internal Communication Problems
The major problem in Amazon's internal communication plan is its policy to limit employee communication on its email platforms. Amazon resolved to limit and control internal communications among employees on their email platform on the grounds that the employees were criticizing the company openly (Brennan, 2020). Most of the employees criticized how the company responded to the covid-19 pandemic amid an upsurge in infections and deaths in the United States and Europe. Amazon’s information technology department notified employees with email networks with more than 500 people to inform moderators before posting anything for approval. The moderators who should be manager-level employees and above are the only Amazon employees with the mandate to authorize employee communications on all social platforms (Ghaffary & Del Ray, 2020). Essentially, Amazon employees use emails to discuss various topics from workplace satisfaction, operational suggestions, and general employee well-being. In some cases, the platforms are used to engage the company on employees' higher pay, workplace safety, and employee engagement. According to some employees, limiting internal communications is targeted to weaken internal activism and limit the position of the employees to a passive role in decision-making. Controlling internal communication forums has disadvantaged the minorities in the workforce as they cannot discuss their dissatisfactions openly. Consequently, the relationship between Amazon's management and the employees has weakened as expected to affect productivity unless the internal communication plans are streamlined.
The New Internal Communication Plan
Audience Analysis
The new internal communication plan for Amazon Company targets the management and the employees. The management and the employees are key stakeholders in the company and play a vital role in ensuring that it runs smoothly and is successful. Therefore, developing an effective communication plan will increase the efficiency of the communication between the management and the employees, resulting in better performance.
Goals and Objectives
The communication plan will seek to bridge the communication and involvement gap between management and employees. Besides, the new communication plan will improve the position of the employees in the organization and consequently optimize productivity and implementation of the company's goals and strategies. Effective communication in an organization establishes loyalty, stronger identification, and dedication that fosters success and development. Also, the new communication plan will seek to demystify the link between Amazon’s control of internal communication among employees and employees’ freedom. Furthermore, the new communication strategy will establish better communication channels that enable the employees to communicate their concerns directly to the management without using social platforms to criticize organizational operations. The internal communication plan will uphold a top-down and down-top communication channel that encourages discussions, compromise, and unconditional engagements between the employees and the management.
Message Platform/Key Messages
The new communication plan will reiterate the position of the employees in safeguarding Amazon's reputation and brand in the modern competitive world. The employees should know that they have a right to communicate internally without the interference of the management. However, the management has the mandate to control the engagements if they risk its operations and reputation in the global market. Besides, the employees should know that there are more engaging and safer communication channels that can be employed to communicate their concerns. Lastly, the employees should think about how to utilize their majority power to draw the management to negotiations and meaningful engagements.
Strategy
The internal communication plan will use the open-door strategy to establish efficient engagement between the management and the employees. The open-door policy will be implemented by implementing two fundamental principles. One, any employee in Amazon who wishes to engage with the management should be confident that the engagement will be effective within a reasonable time. Two, the company must build the confidence in employees that any concern or idea will be considered seriously and discussed openly to establish firm and decisive actions. The principles of the open-door policy might be challenging to implement in big organizations such as Amazon since it has above a million employees. However, having an open-door policy does not mean that any employee can call a manager at any time. Conversely, it means that employees can engage with their supervisors without much struggle. The new communication plan will establish the position of employee representatives who will be part of the management and be actively involved in policy formulation to represent the employees' views. Therefore, employees with concerns will address their grievances to their representatives, who will then communicate with the top management.
Tactics/Channels
The message of the new communication plan will be communicated to the employees through staff meetings, where the leaders will explain the new strategies to resolve employee concerns. In the meetings, the management will require the employees to elect representatives to join the management meetings to address the communication gap.
Evaluation
After implementation, the open-door strategy will be evaluated through internal surveys where employees will be requested to give information on their satisfaction level with the new communication plans. The surveys will measure whether employees are feeling freer to communicate their issues, whether the management is more engaging in matters that affect the employees, and whether internal communication among employees has improved after establishing employee representatives. Surveys are effective evaluation tools since they enable an organization to get an individual perception about a communication plan or strategy. Lastly, surveys will measure the ease of communicating with the management and the likelihood of getting responses in a reasonable time.
References
Brennan, S. (2020). Amazon limits internal communication amid surging employee criticism. IT Pro. https://www.itpro.com/marketing-comms/communications/355497/amazon-limits-internal-communication-amid-surging-employee
Dimar, K., Kuchar, R, A., Rahgas, M, W. (2016). Book battles: A strategic communication analysis of Amazons.com’s dispute with Hachette Book Group and Authors United. Case Studies in Strategic Communication , 5 (2016), 159-190.
Ghaffary, S., Del Ray, J. (2020). Amazon is cracking down on Internal Communication after a Surge in worker activism. VOX. https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/4/29/21240049/Amazon-internal-corporate-employee-backlash-email-listservs-worker-activism-coronavirus#:~:text=Amazon%20is%20cracking%20down%20on%20internal%20communication%20after%20a%20surge,an%20attack%20on%20worker%20organizing .
Gupta, S. K. (2020). Amazon SWOT 2021/SWOT analysis of Amazon . Business Strategy Hub. https://bstrategyhub.com/swot-analysis-of-Amazon-Amazon-swot/
Sabanoglu, T . (2021). Number of Amazon.com employees 2007-2020 . Statista. https://www.statista.com/statistics/234488/number-of-amazon-employees/
Simons, R. (2014). Choosing the right customer. Harvard Business Review. https://hbr.org/2014/03/choosing-the-right-customer
