In August, Amazon rolled out a new system to help its warehouse workers connect with a human — rather than a chatbot — when they had questions about things like time cards or time off.
Amazon’s goal? Respond to questions within 10 seconds.
For warehouse workers, the COVID-19 pandemic — and the unprecedented number of questions about sick time and corporate polices — exposed flaws in the system that left some workers confused about how or why they were fired, and unable to reach anyone who could fix mistakes. Strict attendance rules, workplace expectations and high injury rates mean warehouse workers are often searching for answers that can be elusive in a network that includes thousands of warehouse associates.
Less than six months after launching the new system as another resource for those warehouse associates, Amazon trimmed the workforce in charge of responding to those questions.
As part of a wave of layoffs that could total 18,000 workers, Amazon is cutting from its human resources department, including teams meant to assist warehouse workers with everything from terminations to protected leave to questions about day-to-day operations. Most of the 1.5 million people in Amazon’s global workforce are hourly workers.
In November, the company offered voluntary buyouts to some employees in the HR team, which Amazon calls People, Experience and Technology Solutions. Workers who accepted the package signed off for the last time at the end of December.
Earlier this month, CEO Andy Jassy said Amazon would continue making cuts, naming HR and the company’s stores division as places that would see more layoffs.
For a mostly remote team that Amazon calls its Regional Centers, the cuts mean fewer people to help answer questions from the network of warehouse employees who turn to HR for assistance. Most Amazon warehouses have an on-site HR employee or team to answer immediate questions. But employees can also contact the Regional Center if those teams are jammed or unable to answer the question.
That’s important for workers in the warehouses who are often told to turn to an app rather than the on-site HR rep to get answers, according to Khali Jama, who works at an Amazon fulfillment center in Minnesota.
Jama, who testified at a hearing in support of legislation to establish new worker safety requirements in Minnesota, said she had trouble securing time off when she came down with a fever during a shift. Jama was able to untangle the trail of paperwork and policies, she said at the hearing, but many of her co-workers have struggled to do so. Working with HR is even harder for employees who speak English as a second language.
“You don’t get to talk to people, you get to deal with an app that tells you what to do and not to do,” Jama said.
Applying for leave, for example, “you apply for this thing expecting they’re going to come back to me and understand why I didn’t go to work today,” she continued. “No. Next thing you know you are fired.”
Amazon fired 25 people at her facility in one week in January, she continued. Every Sunday, she has new co-workers.
The Regional Centers for HR are split up by responsibilities — some people process terminations, others process resignations, others answer questions — and by region, helping warehouse workers contact the group closest to them. Amazon declined to say how many HR Regional Centers it has, how many people are staffing those facilities or how many of those jobs will be cut.
“We’re always innovating to create a more positive experience for our employees while also meeting our evolving business needs,” spokesperson Jennifer Flagg said. “We have a number of ways for employees to get assistance from a HR issue area expert when they have questions and we continue to hear positive feedback about these services.”
Flagg said over 86% of employees surveyed in December said they “had a frustration free experience” with the Employee Resource Center, another avenue for finding answers.
But it takes warehouse workers three or four hours to connect with a regional center representative on the phone, based on research from an advocate for Amazon warehouse associates who asked to remain anonymous out of a concern that Amazon would retaliate against them.
Sara Fee, who works at Amazon’s San Bernardino, California, facility, said on-site HR can be hard to reach. Workers there don’t have a phone number to call and recently were given an email address to contract their representative.
Fee relies on HR for help signing off on missed time when the weather gets so bad she can’t leave her home in the mountains. Generally, she has to go through multiple prompts before getting connected to a human, Fee said. Those prompts often push her toward an automated bot or offer to send a text message with a written policy.
Sometimes, she is redirected to the same recording three or four times before she reaches a person, Fee said.
When news of the buyout package offered to HR workers hit employees’ inboxes in November, Amazon wasn’t clear about what the cuts mean for the volume of work handled by the team, according to two former employees who took the voluntary separation package. Both workers asked to remain anonymous to protect new jobs.
One of those employees, who oversaw the team responsible for answering warehouse associates’ questions, asked management if Amazon would change expectations as the team slimmed down. Would management extend the 10-second threshold for answering a new question? “Do we have anything in place to try to make this work better,” they remember asking. “The answer was no.”
“The volume of what we do hasn’t gone down,” they continued. “My team lost around 50% of our volume. It’s a lot of people doing a lot of extra work, trying to figure out how to make this work, until whatever the future looks like happens.”
In October, about two months before Amazon offered the buyout, that employee’s team started working with another group meant to take on questions involving timekeeping and attendance. When that employee left at the end of December, that transition still hadn’t happened, they said.
Like many teams at Amazon, employees at the HR Regional Centers had productivity goals, both former employees said. Workers would aim to answer new inquiries to the live chat feature within 10 seconds, process a resignation in two hours and close an HR case within four hours.
The team that processed terminations had eight minutes, according to another former employee who worked on that group.
In those eight minutes, employees had to get up to speed on the situation – when the warehouse associate had last worked, if they had workers’ compensation, if they’d asked HR for help – and then research an answer and respond.
Sending a response back before the eight-minute timer dinged was considered the bare minimum, that former employee said. Most workers aimed to move faster.
“In the warehouse, (it’s) how many boxes you can scan in an hour, a minute,” they said. “HR … is the same thing. How many cases can you work? Not a single question was: Can you save this person? It’s just: ‘How fast can you do this case?’ ”
Amazon has said it does not use quotas for its workers, regardless of whether they are in a warehouse or on the HR team.
To move cases faster, many people sent reply emails that were simply a pre-written template, the former worker said.
Sometimes, they would find cases where they would want to make an exception. If a warehouse associate was 10 minutes late but didn’t have any unpaid time off left to use, for example, those 10 minutes would kick off a termination. In those cases, there weren’t many options.
“I would say 90% of all the terminations were rightfully done,” the former employee said. “But there’s always that 10% that we could have done better, or (had) that more human touch.”
At times, the department felt more like a “robot reviewing a case” than an HR team, they continued. As an example of how “dehumanizing the process” was, they said their colleagues would communicate about cases using a warehouse worker’s ID number rather than their name.
The formula began with AA, or Amazon associate, and a case number. For example, the former employee said, it might read “AA123 case ID456 has replied to outreach saying that they are homeless.”
In November, that employee applied for the voluntary buyout to resign from the Amazonian Experience and Technology team, the prong of HR where they worked. When they got an email confirming they had been accepted, it didn’t include their own name. Instead, it began “Dear employee.”
On Wednesday, Amazon started notifying the next round of workers slated to lose their jobs. Those layoffs will affect several teams, including the human resources department.
