In spring of 2021 I was working in Amazon raising project, which improved the internal communication with 80%, cutting lots of unnecessary messages, giving the ability to employees to filter, search and find relevant information and to give fast feedbacks during the workflow process. With this I was already supporting managers 3 levels above me, but I still saw the huge impact of the lockdowns, the limitations, social distance and fear through the whole organization. I saw that as a response to the existing need, a global chapter for Mental Health and Wellbeing was approved from the highest level of management at the Amazon HQ. I saw that there was no chapter in Spain and applied to create one. My ex-manager at Amazon told me that I should not waste time in it and I told her that this is a very important and just after half year the hashtag #mentalhealth will be one of the most used and discussed topics in the business world. The manager of my manager wanted me to include him in the chapter, but I refused, as he proved himself to be a selfish and title oriented person (He took a position as responsible for the people with disabilities and was praising with this title and at the same time scheduled a meeting with me when his chapter had international meeting). Yes, it was not easy to accept that someone from Bulgaria, who is working level 3 at Amazon, will be the founder of the first Mental Health and Wellbeing chapter for Amazon in Spain. Another chapter in Barcelona was already created and the people from it were also claiming that among all other activities they will take care of employees wellbeing. The people in this committee were actually the people I needed to go through if I wanted to create something locally. Once I contacted them, they tried to convince me not to do it and to give up. I consisted that such a chapter focused on the Mental Health and Wellbeing is necessary, and it will benefit all employees. Then told me that I need to create a plan for the chapter, need to include people from Amazon, who will work in it and send them this document in 4 days, when they will meet. I understood that they are very far away from embracing me and supporting me and focused on the task. I was able to find people across Amazon, who were interested to join and participate in the chapter, then I wrote and created short document explaining the Mission of the Chapter and sent them before the deadline. After that, I received an email with a meeting invitation. I asked the person to write me an email, but he refused and insisted that we "need to talk". In our video call, he told me that it was not necessary to sent absolutely nothing as the chapter was already created from the HQ. With this, he was pretending to forget that I was asked first to give up and then to create and sent this document.
But it went even futrher ... Yes, I mean here really "futrher" ... what association do you have with the misspelling of this word ("further")? Because I received a very angry callout that they were reading it as "Führer" and pointed it to me.
What was going on in the heads of this people, I leave it to you to conclude. As we were in a video call, he was also threatening me in the most old school was giving me the "friendly advice": "Don't make yourself enemies in Amazon!". You can imagine that the activity of this chapter was never supported. After several months I left this company. The experiences led me to write the book "The corporate and community Shaman in the Age of Aquarius" (which is available on Amazon) and to develop several unique practices (like Karam Flow, KaramCamindo, Digital Detoxication retreat etc.) And here I am including the original document as created in 2021.
Hopefully there will be a day when the companies will be indeed investing time, energy and effort to create a holistically healthy environment for their employees. And I am not talking about environment with robots, AI, fake PR post, control through fear and other means that should remain in the past. We need new approach of Holistic Health at work. Every organization who is aiming to sustain through the dynamic and challenging times need to consider the fact that like in the human body the cells are one of the smallest building blocks of the human body, so are also the employees for and organization. And if you want to have a sustainable organ and organization, take care of your cells. It is simple.