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Shareholder letter- Work from Home [WFH] during pandemic WITH Amazon culture !
- ronakdshahs
- Jul 14, 2023
- 3 min read
While the subject line is a click-bait , its also the most familiar and ingrained sight for every Prione/Amazon employee from Day 1(there we go!). With that said, I am sure most of the below writeup would also ring a bell as I share some snippets of how our daily life in WFH scenario was influenced by the "company culture". As homes became offices in the pandemic, it was a matter of time before the office / company culture seeped into the homes of working couples and houses start operating like the way company does. Here we go:
Just as most meetings or reviews in Amazon start with voice of customer(VoC), our day would start with VoC (Voice of Corona) where we either read the morning newspaper or listened to news that created fear in us about Corona. Lets just say, 'We not just focus on Corona but obsess over it and start working backwards from it by gulping turmeric milk, gargling salt water , having ayurvedic kadha etc'. We saw an improvement in NPS (Net Pandemic Score) due to these interventions and continue to double down on these.
Post VoC,once we as a family were confident to surge ahead for the day, we moved towards JBP[corporate acronym for Joint Business Planning]- Jaadu-Bartan-Pocha where we would pick the assigned tools and resources (read: broom, soap, rag etc) and start optimizing to deliver results. Needless to say, there was a peer review done by the spouse for each other’s work to point out the misses- like me pointing to the corners of the house which weren’t swept or my wife pointing to cthe soap residue on the vessels cleaned by me. These compliance checks and umpteen feedbacks ensured that I put all the SO(a)Ps in place and eventually became a BAR”tan” Raiser !!!
In Q3’20, due to bandwidth constraints, we observed misses in JBP adherence which forced us to introduce mechanisms like WBR (Was Bartan Routine done?) [corporate acronym for Weekly Business Review] & RCA (Roster of Cleaning Activities) [corporate acronym for Root Cause Analysis] .We also saw opportunities to automate certain repetitive tasks through product interventions like robot vacuum cleaner , dishwasher etc for which we proposed a one time budget of INR 0.1 MM (+100% vs 2019 spends), which was subject to bonus earnings.
Cooking new dishes everyday was then a part of mine and my wife’s IDP (Individual development plan). Due to poor performance in first 3 months of the lockdown, we were put into CP (Cooking Plan) [corporate acronym for Coaching Plan] and were asked to enrol ourselves on “Tarla Dalal’s” youtube channel as a part of formal skill development plan. Weekly check ins and monthly 1-1s were done by our respective in-laws to ensure there was progress on this front. To keep ourselves healthy, we monitored critical health metrics like ODR (Oil & Dairy intake Rate) [corporate acronym for Order Defect rate] & LSR (Late sleeping rate) [corporate acronym for Late shipment rate]. We instituted SRP (Self Reward Programs) to keep ourselves motivated during the pandemic wherein we would allow ourselves a binge night every week, on achievement of health goals.
An important cog in our wheel was our son and for him, we calendarized 1pm-2pm everyday as “SON-TIME” where we would Ngage, Connect and check on him. To ensure we were being good parents and course correct if necessary, we would ask him 2 questions daily “How are you feeling today?” & “How satisfied are you with your parents?”. Any misses from our end would get flagged off to his grand-parents which would then comes to us as a “?” , requiring us to deep dive and submit a CoE (Correction of Error).
Post the WFH scenario during pandemic, we believe our role requires up-scoping, considering the complexities and unknowns that we dealt with, as well as to ensure GMS (Good Mental Space) [corporate acronym for Gross Merchandise Sales] share is intact!
Its still DAY 1 (No!!!!!!!!!)
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