With one of the big, most miscellaneous, most distributed work forces in the world, Amazon faces a unique HR challenge: how to deliver a work experience that each employee’s needs need.
Jessie Handbury, Associate Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Amazon visits academically (AVA), helps Amazon’s people, experience and technology central science team (PXTCS) better to understand and respond to the unique, different needs of Amazon employees in every corner of the world. In her role as AVA, Handbury helps her PXT colleagues – which include economists, computer scientists and other researchers – research answers to complex questions.
Handbury was attractive to the AVA program by her mentor, Justine Hastings, vice president of science leading PXTCs. The two shared a research interest in public economy and industrial organization, and Hastings Mented Handbury in his early years as assistant professor at Wharton. When Handbury reintroduced his tenure in Wharton, Hastings invited her to participate in the AVA program and apply her economy expertise to help Amazon reject a better, fairer, more just employee experience.
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“Justine thinks about how we can use science to make better business decisions as they relate to employees,” Handbury explains. “When she opened it up to me, it was,” How can we make Amazon hired “Life better?” I think it was the combination of my background in applied finances and my work with spatial variation in prices, wages and housing costs, in general that matched Amazon’s needs. “
Today, she is drawing on the comprehensive background to help create a workplace experience that is really valuable to Amazon employees across the globe.
“That’s the vision,” says Handbury. “How do we ensure that work at Amazon is meaningful to an employee and that they feel appreciated for their contributions and supported in their performance? And how can we use Amazon’s scale to make this science, models and financial data so we know what our employed and we deliver them?” While the PXTCS team examined these topics before Handbury joined as an AVA, her expertise has helped to accelerate these efforts.
One of the world’s most diversified workforce
Handbury works closely with the PXTCS team to design and roll HR policies and programs that improve the experience of Amazon employees. With a research background that melts together labor and public economy, Handbury is well known to help understand the different needs of Amazon’s enormous workforce.
Part of what we try to do is to recognize and understand the different skills, experiences and goals for Amazon’s employees. We try to find fair ways to serve people with different preferences.
This background included research in urban economy, industrial organization and international trade that have helped decision makers and urban planners promote urban development. She has also helped to shed light on how local America, rules for land -Uuse and transport policies form urban development patterns, housing prices and household rental choices.
“Part of what we try to do is recognize and understand the different skills, experiences and goals for Amazon’s employees,” says Handbury. “We try to find fair ways to serve people with different preferences.”
Handbury and the PXTCS team employ data-driven tests and models to understand the unique needs of Amazon’s workforce, offers and test new solutions and offers, measure recording and response and predictably scale business-covering adoption. Handbury has expertise in the space police, which helps to investigate how a policy – whether from Amazon or the government – can affect employment differently based on their rent.
“Amazon has to have employees in expensive cities such as New York, Seattle and San Francisco,” Handbury points out. “So what can Amazon do from an HR perspective to support these employees? And what can we as researchers do to take the perspective of Amazon’s employees and help give Benefits that make it easier for hired to live in these markets and work at Amazon? “
Examination of open enrollment rates
An example of Handbury’s data -driven approach at Amazon centers on the question of whether employees choose or update their health insurance options during open enrollment periods and what can motivate these decisions.
“What we are working on now is to look at the data and investigate how many Amazon employees are using open enrollment periods,” she explains. “We look at the employed population who tend to sign up more frequently against those who make it less frequent and whites have high or low rates.”
These approaches include the use of supervisor to determine which factors may have played a role for employee who did not choose insurance when they first joined Amazon.
“We hope to read why they did not sign up to try to see what factors were most prominent,” says Handbury. “These responsibilities will help inform if the process itself is a barrier to registration. If, for example, new hires did not sign up because they found that the process was difficult to navigate or have found the plans difficult to understand, we can work to solve them from when used periods.
Handbury notes that the answer can be as simple as employees who are not aware that they can make updates.
“For some employees, there is a stickiness for health insurance decisions,” she says. “They make the decision on which they have to sign up for certain benefits, especially health insurance and various health insurance programs once employed; they make add adjustments during the open enrollment period. Registration would help employees if health needs have changed to resume to better match their current needs.”
Another contributing factor can be found in the sometimes frightening task of analyzing and comparing different health opportunities.
“Sometimes the language of health insurance programs can be difficult to understand, especially when assessing exactly what the costs and benefits are,” she explains. “Is it something that could be improved with some better materials or by pairing employment from distributing experts who can help make the enrollment process?”
Handbury notes that for these questions they are not trivial, eith. “Designated that we do not have to tailor the way Benfits is introduced to the employee in a way that allows them to really reap the benefits offered if they want them.”
Explaining the world with models
Born and raised in Australia, Handbury came to the United States to the university, partly because she was sure what would do after college.
“In Australia, most of the undergraduate programs were professionals,” she remembers. “The people who did well in high school wow went into or medicine. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and were Fortnate Enfuch to America and ‘Hit Paus’ about this decision.”
Handbury was fascinated by data and models, which led to her persecution of finances. During her bachelor years at Columbia University, where she got a bachelor of economics and mathematics, Handbury studied international trade and the underlying theories of how the economy works.
“The beauty of economics is that you can explain what is happening in the world with models. There are patterns in the data and you can understand these patterns with simple, elegant theories,” says Handbury.
After Stints at A- and Year Economics Consulting Firm, Handbury returned to Columbia to pursue a PhD. In economics. “I spent my early 20s playing with data – learning and modeling – and I realized I would go into research and get my PhD.”
Handbury says she thoroughly enjoys the collaboration with Amazon Becaus, it gives her more opportunities for mentorship. “It is wonderful to be able to work with such a number of teams and a number of questions. Many of our PhD students will become researchers and economists at large companies like Amazon.
As far as advice she would give to future researchers, Handbury keeps it simple: Focus on what you enjoy. “Not every day will be fun, but for the most part you want your work to be something you look forward to sitting down to every day,” she says. “If you enjoy the journey you take and the people you think of it with, the successful results are just the icing on the cake.”