Associate Empowerment – Amazon
Certain data points, names, and details have been altered or generalized to maintain confidentiality and respect internal privacy requirements.
Contextualizing the Problem
Amazon has a self-service app that allows associates to fix most issues (time card changes, utilize benefits, put in transfer requests, etc) on their own, but associates would spend a significant amount of time during the workday and their breaks in line to speak to HR for help instead of using the app. People could be waiting for 2 hours for help.
This also impacted the HR team's bandwidth by 70% as they spent the majority of the day rerouting issues to the correct team and educating associates on how to use the app for future issues. The team was falling behind on their direct duties and started to burn out.
I wondered why more associates would go to HR instead of using the app or contacting the correct team for help.
Topics associates came to HR for help
Research Methodology
To get a better understanding of our associates and why they came to HR, I conducted quantitative and qualitative surveys with 50% of the building.
Types of questions I asked:
- What issues do you come to HR with?
- When you have a problem what is your process to resolve it?
- Did you know there are other support teams who are more suited to assist you for X problem?
- Did you know you could resolve this by using the app? You can use the app anywhere, anytime, and you don't need to talk to anyone.
Interviews was considered as a research methodology, but it was not chosen due to time and labor constraints.
Insights
Only 2% of associates and managers surveyed knew that there were resources readily available that they could use to independently resolve issues. Many associates thought HR was the correct place to go to for any issue.
Based on the insight I got from the survey, I realized that there was a lack of knowledge and education on resources associates can use to resolve their issues or how to escalate to the correct support team.
I hypothesized that if we educated the associates and managers and created accessible problem-solving guides, we could increase the number of associates who independently resolve issues and reduce the strain on the HR team.
Training slide created to educate managers on how to assist associates with timecard corrections
Impact and Results
I created and led an education campaign that teaches managers and associates the self-service resources available to them and how to fully utilize them. While creating educational resources, I informed the self-service app team that their lack of an onboarding page might cause a lot of associates to not fully utilize the app since many associates did not know the features existed.
After 3 months of campaigning, self service utilization cases increased by 69%. Associates were empowered with tools to resolve their issues independently at a time and place that is most convenient to them. They were also able to directly contact the correct team for assistance instead of needing HR to reroute them. Manager engagement scores also increased as they were able to use educating their associates about self-service resources as an engagement opportunity to connect and build trust.