Working with Amazon

Christmas is always busy, but 2021’s festive demand was even busier than usual at Amazon UK. With temporary lockdown restrictions imposed during a key purchasing period, consumers turned to Amazon to find must-have items, search out present ideas as well as buying food and drink. Even the lifting of restrictions at the start of December didn’t reduce demand – if anything it increased even faster.

Coping with the sheer scale of demand meant that all of Amazon’s 27 distribution sites were being overwhelmed with orders ready for delivery. Between mid-November and Christmas Eve, thousands of temporary seasonal staff were called in to help get parcels out on time.

Unfortunately, this created another problem – demand for staff car parking at Amazon sites also increased rapidly. It resulted in a potentially difficult situation since Amazon needed to ensure that all parking rules were maintained so that traffic could flow smoothly. All staff had to be able to arrive and leave Amazon sites easily and quickly.

Our marshals quickly came to the rescue.  We provided a team of up to 10 marshals per site, every day, including Event managers.  Their task was to organise the car parks.

Duties included:

• Maintain safety practices and behaviour, including but not limited to pedestrian walkways. Vehicles had to adhere to all speed limits, and staff could walk – but not run – around the site.
• Direct drivers to lanes where parking was available
• Ensure all drop offs and pick-ups occurred only in designated areas
• Optimise the number of parking spaces by making sure bad parking taking up multiple bays was avoided
• Directing traffic to and from overflow car parks
• Obtain and measure car park exit times across day and night shifts
• Provide end of shift reports to the site’s loss prevention team
• Report any work related incidents and near misses
• Avoid escalating any poor behaviour and conduct among drivers trying to park
• Supporting on site security

Professional Car Park Marshals

It was a tall order, but one with which our professionally trained teams of Marshals were more than capable of meeting.  All the marshals and Event managers were familiar with such situations, and knew exactly how to organise car parks so that there were no problems from Day One.