Power of Anecdotes creates a new listening mechanism leveraging anecdotes to allow senior leaders to work backwards from the “voice of employee” using innovation on the basis of a 90 minutes workshop.  The objective of the program is to enable leaders to better understand issues and challenges that underrepresented employees face and commit to actions to improve their experience at workplace.  It is a learning program that creates a safe space for leaders to learn from Amazon employees’ voice. This allows leaders to practice 1) empathy 2) active listening 3) deeper understanding on daily situations/experience that impacts theinclusion of employees based on various themes 4) accepting different perspective and 5) curiosity.

Power of Anecdotes was initiated as a Think Big idea to create a new mechanism and disruptive and immersive experience leveraging anecdotes from lived experiences of employees to allow leaders to work backwards from the “voice of employee” disrupt biases and commit to actions to improve employee experience and drive sustainable impact on overall team culture.  It stemmed from a deep dive conducted in Q1-22 to understand the key challenges and opportunities across underserved talent employees’ experience to support our goal to improveinclusion sentiment and reduce attrition.  We identified that leaders were relying primarily on data that surface high level trends and areas of focus, but insights failed to highlight direct sentiment of employees describing their experiences at workplace, or surface broader trends across orgs to understand the outsized impacted to underserved populations.  While some leaders requested ad hoc deep dives led by various teams to understand and address additional employees’ anecdotes, the processes to run/collect were managed in siloed and manually (e.g. listening sessions, surveys, interviews), and the insights were not consolidated to understand trends across orgs/teams/countries.  To achieve our objectives, we were inspired by the Customer Connection Customer Service (C2CS) program structure and design, whose vision is to accelerate customer advocacy by empowering Amazonians to relentlessly use the Voice of the Customer and raise their Customer Obsession bar by using real situations impacting real employees/customers.

The objective of PoA is twofold: 1) to create Employee as Customers Obsessed model by enabling leaders to build empathy by better understanding issues and challenges employees face by listening to the lived experience, and committing to actions to improve and 2) to collect/scale voice of employee anecdotes to better identify and act on themes across orgs/teams/countries.

The 90 minutes workshop learning experience is dedicated to senior managers and leaders (Executives, SVPs, VPs, directors) recognizing their position of influence and power to drive cultural and behavioural change top down.  Anecdotes are collected from employees through different listening mechanisms (e.g. focus groups, round tables, interviews etc) led by Affinity group leaders or DEI/HR Business Partners.  Each session is focused on one or two communities/topics, e.g. Black, Latin, PwD, Women, LGBTQI+ experience.  Program is end to end led by the DEI Leadership & Development PM in partnership with the DEI BPs in different regions who facilitate the sessions with leaders they support.  We partner with DEI Data Analytics and HR Data Privacy teams to protect the anonymized anecdotes from employees.  The Program is run fully by internal resources and using best practices established by C2CS sessions leveraging the best practices to operate in effective and agile way.  Each session has one technical producer to support the display of voice over of anecdotes to ensure smooth learning experience and allow the facilitator to lead the discussion with leaders.

Since pilot launch in Oct-22, we delivered 34 sessions (20 virtual and 14 on site) across 10+ different organizations, with the participation of 460 senior leaders and a 93% favorable score from survey feedback (“I would recommend this session to my colleagues”).  To measure success, we monitor NPS scores with additional benchmarking for 1) content relevancy enablement, and 2) facilitator.  Based on the results from the pilot expansion, we are working to scale PoA across Amazon worldwide.