An inside look at the people, tech, and systems that make Amazon’s Prime Day possible

For millions of shoppers, Amazon Prime Day is a coveted festival of discounted fare…from air fryers to Yankee Candles to ceramic butter boats to parachute pants. For Amazon, it’s one of the company’s most demanding workforce and operational stress tests. And for the HR and robotics teams, it’s all made possible by careful coordination and months of preparation.

Across its network of warehouses and fulfillment centers, the online retail giant prepares and aligns its people, technology, and systems for the annual surge in orders. Prime Day (which ran from June 23–26) has evolved into a carefully designed exercise of employee communication, training, and engagement, not to mention increasing human-robot collaboration.

“I think the first thing that we have to do is ensure that we’re all aware of what it is that we are going to be delivering, and that’s pretty clear to most Amazonians, because from day one we know we’re customer obsessed, and we work backwards from the customer,” Sandy Gordon, VP of employee experience and relations told HR Brew. “Our goal is to make sure that we’re always listening…The truth of this is that we’ve been working toward this for months.”

According to executives, teams use daily stand-up huddles inside fulfillment centers to align employees around priorities, introduce new tools, answer questions, and reinforce that customer-first mindset. As Prime Day approaches, those meetings increasingly focus on what employees can expect during the high-volume event and how each team contributes to its success, according to Gordon.

And during the event, it’s a two-way feedback loop between workers and leaders, assessing what went well and where things could improve or adjustments that might make the next day even better.

The people. Gordon told HR Brew it’s an exciting atmosphere, and Amazonians bring their own Prime Day excitement to the floor (Amazon employees are also Prime members, Gordon said, adding that the company offers free Prime memberships to many of its employees). Music fills warehouses, food is readily available, and teams celebrate milestones throughout the day.

And many Amazon leaders leave the C-suite behind, she added. During Prime Day, executives can be found on warehouse floors and engaged with the teams “making it happen.”

Gordon’s team doesn’t exactly measure success by the number or packages delivered, but rather by whether its workers know and understand the important role they played in pulling it all off.

“For us, success from an HR perspective for our employees is that at the end of it, [employees] feel a part of the team that brought success and magic to customers, that they really understand and feel that they contributed to the success that we experience, that they too feel like they received from from that success, and so it’s a team effort,” she said.

Robots. Execs also shared with HR Brew that technology is becoming an increasingly important teammate to Amazon warehouse workers.

This year Amazon rolled out its Proteus mobile robots. These lime-green, oversized-Roomba-lookin’ mobile robots are able to lift carts with up to 900 pounds of customer orders, maneuver the containers through human-filled warehouses, and head out to the loading docks for delivery.

Proteus is specifically designed to safely work alongside people, allowing it to navigate shared workspaces while detecting and avoiding nearby employees, according to Scott Dresser, VP of Amazon robotics.

“It’s not in your way, you don’t feel like it’s a hindrance, and it never is unsafe,” Dresser said, adding that it’s designed to be intuitive to work alongside humans.

Proteus’s user interface “looks like a set of eyes on the front of it, that gives our associates clues as to what the robot is doing.”

Robotic solutions at Amazon can eliminate excessive employee walking, high or low lifting, heavy lifting, repetitive activities, and “build systems that are more ergonomic and more safe to make sure that [employees] can execute on the hard tasks that they have to do to deliver on behalf of our customers,” shifting employees toward work that requires more problem-solving and coordination.

Sound familiar? “When we think about robotics, and the robotics applications at Amazon, we work back primarily from the employee experience,” Dresser said. “Because they’re our primary customer.”

Amazon told HR Brew that its investments in robotics for more than a decade have also delivered on new jobs and new types of jobs for its human workforce.

Dresser pointed to the company’s robotics apprenticeship program, which trains warehouse employees to maintain, clean, and troubleshoot the robotic equipment.

“The work that exists within our warehouses is evolving, and it has been over time. We’ve been in the space of robots for 15 years or so,” Gordon said. “In that time, we created and hired hundreds of thousands of employees, but we’ve also created new jobs [and] new job categories to appropriately advance the work of our people alongside that technology.”