In conversation with Amazonians behind the scene

As a company that has millions of products being bought online from near and far corners of the world, we ensure that they reach you without any delay and at the earliest possible time. This is made possible by our numerous FCs and our dedicated workforce there.

Through this series, we want to share a few stories of these incredible people who make everything behind the storefront run like clockwork and deliver a better customer experience. This is the story of Nijil George, An Amazon FC site leader. Nijil has worked with Amazon for the past 3.5 years and leads the center at Chennai. After working for 9+ years in multiple roles at a leading FMCG firm, Nijil felt he wanted to get out of his comfort zone and accelerate his learning curve by taking up a challenging role at Amazon.

The FC is always open - 24*7 hrs. When Nijil first started out leading the Chennai FC, he noticed the lack of diversity in the team due to restrictions on women working during the night shift. In order to combat this situation, Nijil worked with HR team and regulatory agencies and ensured that the FC got necessary approvals to operate night shift with female associates. Until then, there were limited opportunities for women in the nearby communities for taking up formal sector employment. He worked closely with the HR and site security team to ensure facilities such as doorstep transport as well as security escort services are made available – leading to more women to join the workforce. With this initiative, women in local communities got opportunity to work at Amazon fulfilment centers in both shifts and now there is an almost equal male-to-female ratio in the FC.

As a site leader, it is important for Nijil that a 2-way communication happens between him and his team. He speaks with all the departments he is associated with, to highlight their issues and all associates have an opportunity to highlight any issues faced by them on the voice of associate board. He ensures that all issues are resolved on priority and he personally reviews those issues the very next day.

As the lead of the FC, Nijil is very passionate about his work and takes extra measures to ensure customer satisfaction and happiness. He shares an emotional anecdote wherein he along with his team got to know that one of the customers’ son was suffering from cancer through the customer services team. Once made aware of this fact, the entire team - right from FC to the last mile delivery teams, got together to ensure that the customer received his product way ahead of his delivery date for his son. The customer had no clue about this and was pleasantly surprised at this kind gesture. Nijil credits the entire team to have brought a smile to the customers face, through this gesture.

Of his job, Nijil says, “I get to pilot new ideas and processes and get to learn new things even after 15 years of working and scale it across the network, it can’t get more exciting than this!” His leadership principle is - Learn and Be Curious. “The extremely dynamic culture at Amazon reminds us to explore and take up challenging tasks despite the risk of failure. The peers at Amazon drive you to perform better and the pace of work pushes you to step up your game and innovate to put sustainable mechanisms in place,” he adds. It’s a great place to work for anyone who chases dynamism and loves to think out-of-the-box like him.