Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. This episode is one of a series of special dispatches on the sweeping effect that Covid-19 is having on society, the economy, and the future of work. In addition to our regular podcast episodes, we’ll be bringing you shorter and more frequent interviews with business leaders, policy makers, and leading scholars on the coronavirus. Amazon needs no introduction, and it has practically become the essential supply chain into every home in America during the crisis. My guest today is Ardine Williams, vice president of workforce development at Amazon. In January of this year, we released a podcast with Ardine on Amazon’s workforce that quickly became one of our most popular. Ardine has graciously returned to talk with us about how Amazon is tackling the unexpected challenges posed by Covid-19. Welcome, Ardine.

Ardine Williams: Thanks for having me. It’s great to talk with you again, Bill.

Kerr: Ardine, there’s only a handful of companies globally that have the scale of operations that Amazon does. Yet you’ve had to be pretty responsive during the crisis. So I’d love for you to first take us inside Amazon. What’s it been like over the last month?

Williams: So, I don’t think there’s a person on the planet that hasn’t in some way been impacted by this pandemic. And so I think to start, it’s important for us to just give a little context. So Amazon currently in the US has more than 500,000 employees across 1,000 sites. So if you think about that from an aircraft carrier perspective, that’s about 80, 85 aircraft carriers that we’re trying to navigate through something pretty unprecedented. What happened very quickly was just the increase in demand, as you said, as Amazon became a more essential supply provider for things that people needed day to day, whether they were observing shelter-in-place requirements from their local government or because they were, like my parents, elderly and not able to leave the house. And so we found that we had to make an awful lot of changes really, really quickly. And Amazon’s a company that prides itself on working quickly, but this was a pace like nothing I’ve ever experienced. In a very short period of time, we had to make a lot of decisions around, how do we keep our employees safe? What are the things that we need to do to continue to comply with rapidly changing guidelines, whether they were from the CDC, from the WHO, from local, state, and federal governments. And so responding to that just took an army of folks making very, very quick decisions. And then, sometimes as soon as the next meeting 12 hours later, needing to readjust that decision. So I’d say the first thing is, it was a lot of very, very quick work. And as you may have read on the blog, we’ve made more than 150 process changes just around the way we work to ensure that we’re able to still get shipments to customers and to keep our employees safe at work. So things like increasing distancing between workstations, about thinking about how we avoid gatherings when people do normal things, like come into the workplace or move from the workplace out to lunch. So thinking about what appear to be simple changes, like staggering shifts starts by five minutes. Well, every one of those changes has a downstream cascade effect. So what do you do with payroll systems? How do you notify people what the shift change is going to be? What does that do to capacity on the floor to get customer orders out? So lots of what appear to be kind of small changes that have a cascade effect that we make across the company.

Kerr: Another thing that you’ve, I think, had to balance here just a little bit, you have customers that are the end user of the product, and you also have those that are the suppliers. And as you’ve had to prioritize some products being delivered faster than others, how has that relationship management gone?

Williams: That was an incredibly difficult decision. As the demand increased, we made a very painful decision to prioritize the shipment of essential goods—so things like groceries, baby food, medicine, household items, diapers, formula. And that meant that for many of our products—more than half of the products that Amazon sells are actually from third-party sellers—and making that decision to deprioritize a lot of their goods was extraordinarily difficult, because it impacts their livelihood. But as we took a step back and said, “Okay, what’s most critical for our customers?” … Now, I believe today we announced that we’re beginning to accept those less-essential items back into the fulfillment center so that we can begin to fulfill those orders, as well as our supply chain started to stabilize.

Kerr: I love the aircraft carrier analogy, and I think you had like 85 different aircraft carriers. They’re also spread across a whole bunch of different contexts, ranging from some frontline cities of the crisis like New York to more rural areas. What are some of the local policies that you’ve found can help your operations run more effectively or might get in the way?

Williams: Well, what we saw initially in Europe was ... there’s been a lot of guidance about face masks. You know, first it was only health care workers, obviously, with the N95s, but then people who were ill should wear droplet masks or surgical masks. And the guidance has now shifted that everyone, where you can’t observe social distancing, should wear a mask. And so that’s helped a lot, I think, to put employees more at ease as they come into the workplace. I think that one of the places where we’ve had a bit of a challenge is where you operate across multi-jurisdictions. So, for example, if you have a fulfillment center in one location, in one state, you know people are crossing borders, for example, it’s important that, as those curfew restrictions are put in place or quarantine requirements are put in place, that we’re working with the local jurisdictions to make sure that our employees have the right documentation, so that they’re identified as essential workers and they can, in fact, cross those jurisdictional lines. It’s been a challenge for equipment-repair teams, for example, that normally move, obviously, really easily across the country, when there are requirements to quarantine for 14 days upon crossing boundaries. So it’s made us really rethink how we handle that equipment repair, for example, or how we start up a new site and do it in a way where we’re leveraging more local resources.

Kerr: As you’re trying to redirect something as large as Amazon into new ways, I imagine having a bit of advanced notice is important. But we’re also clearly struggling in a policy and business environment where we’re needing to react very quickly to news that comes in, and sometimes that news may lead us to shift course, especially back in the early days of the crisis. Has there been a sort of a cadence that you’ve been able to set up with policy makers to understand when something might be changed and give you guys a little bit of lead time?

Williams: I think we get the same, I don’t know that we get more lead time than anyone. I think that because we do have representation across many, many states and in jurisdictions, we have those relationships and are able to engage in conversations around, what does this actually mean? What does this look like in practice? But like Amazon—and we pride ourselves on being scrappy and taking that minimum lovable product approach in the beginning and then adjusting—we’re experiencing that on the receiving end, on the policy front, too, as states and local jurisdictions grapple with how to best protect their residents. And so it’s been very typical to see jurisdictional policies change as legislators learn more about what the impact of their policy was versus the intent. But I think that open, two-way dialogue between—not just two-way—an open dialogue in times like this is incredibly important, because it allows us as the user to provide that feedback to say, “Is this what you intend? How can we accommodate this other need?” And, by and large, jurisdictions are incredibly receptive to that positive and productive feedback.

Kerr: That’s great. As you think about the Covid crisis and what you’ve learned about managing people in this crisis, what are some of the things you think might carry over into the future after the crisis, at least, recedes and, ideally, goes away?

Williams: Well, I think that one of the most interesting ones for me is how quickly virtual teams have accelerated. I’ve worked with leading global teams for a long time, and being virtual is part of that. But there’s always been that, well, every X weeks or every X months, people come one way or the other. I was just on a call today—we’ll host more than 8,000 interns this summer, and those internships kick off, the first wave kicks off, at the end of April. And we will be hosting those interns virtually. And when you think about that, it’s kind of a ... I really, it was hard for me to get my head wrapped around that, because you’re going to immerse someone in a culture, give them meaningful work, help them ramp and learn how to take the skills they’ve learned in theory and apply them in practice. And I caught myself maybe demonstrating maybe in my inflexible age [00:16:14] and thinking, “Well, is this really going to work?” And then I thought about a team I’m working with right now in support of Washington State. And I’m working with a large group of people internally that I’ve never worked with before. But we’re using a communication product called “Chime.” We have regular standup meetings. We have an internal chat room. I’m able to get someone as quickly on a quick video call as I could grabbing them in the hallway. And I thought, “Hey, wait a minute. It is working.” I think the twist for us is, because most of us have been with the company for a period of time, there’s, “Hey, we know how this works.” But we’ve also got a gentleman on the team who joined two weeks ago, and he’s finding his way. So I think the exciting piece is, it’s really forcing us to think about, is it possible to truly build a virtual team and not have to travel? And how do you make that effective? And how do you help students come in, get a feel for the culture, learn to do meaningful work? For example, our software development engineers build customer-facing product when they’re working with us. And then, how do we, as managers, assess that student during that tenure. And then, on the other hand, how does that student assess Amazon and say, “Yeah, this is a place I’d like to be.”

Kerr: Yeah. So, getting beyond just even to managing virtual teams and so forth, let’s go back to your current role and also the original podcast of workforce development. How could you see this changing the implications for Amazon’s future workforce development strategy?

Williams: I think the piece that I’m tremendously worried about, and this is just in conversations here in the DMV, is the impact on our longer-term pipeline. So remember our recall for H22? We’re going to hire 25,000 employees over a 10-year window. And that means that there are kids who are in grade school right now who are potential future Amazon employees. And what’s happening, particularly in K–12, is a relatively low uptake across the country, again, in general, of students engaging digitally in lesson plans. And so we have the potential of students losing at least a quarter of the work for this this year, if you think about four quarters in the school term. And then potentially there not being summer school and those support programs. And then, in the fall if we end up with another wave, we’ve got a very significant disruption to education. And then move up to the junior or community college level, the impact is even more profound, because now you have students who are potentially economically impacted because they’ve lost a job, and we’ve moved from a 4 percent unemployment rate to the last pair of labor statistics, I think, were like theoretically at 15.7 percent. Those students who don’t have access to broadband or who don’t have a laptop, how are they going to continue that education? And so, I worry a lot about that lasting impact on the workforce development front. And it isn’t just for Amazon; this is for the entire country, because we have disparity around access to broadband, access to the tools that you need to take advantage of those lessons, and then a population of teachers that were thrust, like my sister, relatively quickly into trying to teach high school math and science virtually. And we’re going to have our work cut out for us, I think, to make sure we get ourselves back on track, that we take advantage of what we learn and we get back on track to qualifying folks for the jobs of tomorrow.

Kerr: Yeah, I can appreciate that. On this side also having been thrust very quickly into virtual teaching, that’s not the easiest of tasks. Well, Ardine ...

Williams: You’ve done that first hand. You’ve got great experience.

Kerr: Yeah. We really thank you for taking some time out of what is certainly a busy day to join us and talk about what you’re doing internally at Amazon, and then some of the lessons you’re keying on for the future. Let’s all hope that this workforce development strategy for Amazon, as well as also for all of the US economy, is able to overcome some of these bumps and get back on path. Thanks for joining us.

Williams: Thank you.

Kerr: Thank you for listening to this special episode of the Managing the Future of Work podcast. To find out more about our project on the future of work and for more information on the coronavirus’s impact, visit our website at hbs.edu/managing-the-future-of-work and sign up for our newsletter.