Problem 1:
a) Did Amazon have a special responsibility to their employees during the COVID-19 pandemic? Did they meet this responsibility? Why or why not?
b) Compare and contrast Amazon's responsibility to their employees to Ally Financials' treatment of their employees. What could Amazon have adopted from Ally Financials' approach and why?
Problem 2: Consider the ideas outlined in the Harvard Business Review article, "Coronavirus Is Putting Corporate Social Responsibility to the Test"
How would you redo Amazon's policy on corporate social responsibility considering the workplace safety allegations? Provide the relevant section from their 2021 sustainability report as well as the modifications you would add and explain why.
Problem 3: Pushed by the pandemic, Amazon embarked on an ambitious hiring strategy in 2021. Much of Amazon's business success and financing from Wall Street investors is dependent on its workforce of more than 1 million people who pick, pack, and ship its customers' orders nearly 24/7.
Imagine that you are a project manager hired to implement a new AI recruiting tool to assist with the hiring strategy. During the final user-testing, your project team identifies a risk that the tool is penalizing women. About 60% of the candidates the AI tool chose were male, which was due to patterns in data on Amazon's historical recruitments. You have been informed by Amazon management that a quick finish of this project will yield more work for you in the future, but your project team is advising a significant schedule adjustment to allow time to update the data. Do you make recommendations to Amazon to extend the schedule and manage the risk based on what you have discovered? Why or why not?
Problem 4: What motivational techniques might a manager at Amazon use to motivate their employee's post-pandemic? Connect a motivational theory we have learned about to explain why this would be an appropriate motivation since the time of the pandemic?