From musculoskeletal disorders to promoting great leadership, global safety officer wants to create a healthy environment
With over 1.5 million employees around the globe, Amazon knows that safety is a big challenge. And safety amid a pandemic is an even bigger challenge.
Having started as VP, worldwide, workplace health and safety at Amazon in April 2019, Heather MacDougall was very quickly thrust into the thick of the action with the pandemic. “As safety professionals, this has been the biggest challenge in our careers.”
To learn more about McDougall’s stellar career and how Amazon is investing to keep its workers safe, you can read the full feature here.
But, she says, Amazon was able to leverage its resources to respond to the crisis. “I learned that there’s speed in business, there’s Amazon speed, and then there’s Amazon-in-a-pandemic speed!”
Despite the challenges caused by the pandemic, MacDougall says that the important work that she, her team, and her organization have done for Amazon’s workers and committees has been “energizing” because of the “critical importance of the work that we do for our employees, our customers, and our communities.”
Even before the pandemic, the team understood the importance of collaboration. But, she says, it’s interesting to see how adept the organization as a whole is at collaborating, and how that has taken on a new meaning. MacDougall says COVID required the team to execute quickly and make a series of rapid pivots, which were aided by a lot of collaboration and adaptability.
“The bias for action is the secret sauce of Amazon; we make decisions quickly, and we’re very quick to pivot and to innovate.”
To learn more about McDougall’s stellar career and how Amazon is investing to keep its workers safe, you can read the full feature here.
