Walmart Human Resource Management Essay Example

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Overview of Walmart Incorporated

Walmart Inc. is a multinational retail company that operates discount and department stores, grocery stores, neighborhood markets, hypermarkets, and supermarkets. It operates through three segments, including Sam’s Club, Walmart International, and Walmart U.S. Walmart belongs to the wholesale and retail business industry. It offers a variety of services and merchandise at consumer-friendly prices. Walmart’s mission is to provide global assistance to people anywhere and anytime to save more and live better through e-commerce and retail stores. Its vision comprises enabling busy families to have continuously more accessible days. Cost leadership is the general strategic type that allows it to compete based on low selling prices. Its directional strategy comprises becoming the ultimate destination for clients to save more money and shop as much as they want. Donna Morris is the chief people officer and executive vice president of Walmart Incorporated. The company is subject to U.S. Labor Laws and the International Human Rights Laws.

Planning and Acquiring Talent

Retail and e-commerce are the two primary jobs that Walmart Incorporated must fulfill in its main area of operations. The typical TDRs for each position include Walmart neighborhood markets, Walmart Supercenters, and Walmart Discount Stores. The requisite KSQs for Walmart retail stores have attention to detail, communication, customer service, business awareness, interpersonal skills, and basic computer skills. According to Baud and Durand (2021), the human resource management in Walmart uses external and internal recruitment sources to fill various positions. The most significant internal recruitment sources include transfers, trainees, and current employees, while external recruitment sources include previous applicants, campuses, and respondents to job advertisements.

The HR management in Walmart uses both indirect and direct methods of recruitment. Direct methods involve directly contacting the prospective employees, while the indirect methods involve making advertisements utilizing the company’s website and other media. The job position is what determines the selection criteria for future employees in Walmart. The HR management uses essential measures such as criminal background checkups and training and education background. The HR management also uses job knowledge evaluations, structured interviews, situational judgment tests, and personality tests to make a final selection of their job candidates.

Maintaining Talent

Michael (2017) states that Walmart academies feature prominently concerning the training opportunities in Walmart. Each academy connects to a supercenter and provides the employees with a two-to-six-week training program. This training takes place in a classroom setting involving advanced retail skills necessary to prepare for a new role or start an entry-level job. Walmart has also partnered with VR startup STRIVP to incorporate new dynamics in its associate training programs. Employees using this technology can enter a 360-degree VR representation of the actual and real-world scenarios. Employees are then required to make choices based on what they perceive as the best choice when encountering different situations. The scenarios provided involve several elements such as customer service, management, and important events such as sales extravaganzas.

Different training programs such as Equal Employment Opportunity Training, Total Talent Management (TTM), Business Leadership Series (BLS), and Assistant Management Training (AMT) in its system for developing the required employee skills necessary for success. BLS is a unique training program used by Walmart to increase organizational officers’ business knowledge and leadership competencies. TTM is a diversity-training program used by the company to unite the organization that operates businesses in not less than 2,000 locations worldwide. As a talent development program, Walmart uses AMT for organizational managers, which provides an opportunity for career development. It increases the quality of operational and leadership training, which boosts store proficiency and individual talent.

Rewarding Talent

According to the 2019 Environmental, Social and Governance Report of Walmart, a full-time worker in Walmart retail stores in the United States makes approximately $ 25,000 a year. The average range per hour is between $11 and $24.70 per hour (Crawford and Smith, 2019). The company considers full-time as 34 hours a week, but most workers average between 37 to 38 hours a week. The actual salaries of retail store managers depend on the size of the store and the sales volume and range at approximately $175,000 a year. A comparative wage analysis of Walmart reveals that its competitors, such as Costco and Amazon, pay their workers at least $15 an hour. In 2018, Doug Mcmillon, the CEO of Walmart, earned a whopping $22.8 million, approximately 1000 times the average earnings of a full-time worker. A senior software engineer concerned with e-commerce platforms earns an annual salary of roughly $118,060, ranging between $83,000 and $161,000.

Walmart offers several benefits to its employees. These include insurance and affordable healthcare, parental and maternal leaves, employee training, education benefits, a positive work environment, retirement plans, savings and discount benefits, and paid time off. Walmart offers all its eligible employees vision, medical, and dental procedures at a reasonable cost. It also provides accident insurance, permanent and temporary disability insurance, severe illness insurance, dismemberment and accidental death insurance, and organization-paid life insurance. In recognition of family relationships and their importance, Walmart offers its full-time and salaried workers that have been active for at least one year of parental and maternity benefits. It includes a $5000 expense benefit for adopting a new family member and ten weeks of paid leave for new mothers. Walmart has also entered an agreement with Guild Education to enable employees who have not completed their studies to do so at the expense of the company. The education benefits provided by Walmart cover professional development programs and language training. Walmart employees get discount cards to obtain a 10% discount on general merchandise, fresh fruits, and vegetables at Walmart stores.

As regards Collective Bargaining Agreements (CBAs), Walmart is one of the most aggressive anti-union companies in the U.S. It has a long history of downplaying unionization efforts, and people are reluctant to vote for a union because they fear that it will culminate in the closure of their store. Anonymous sources reveal that Walmart perceives unions as money-grabbers who care little about the welfare of workers and spend their hard-earned money on things other than representing them. Walmart has continuously and actively supported diversity and inclusion, evidenced by its score of 100 on the DEI (Disability Equality Index) for the sixth consecutive year.

Evaluation

The human resource managers at Walmart effectively address criticisms and issues while at the same time optimizing its workforce and the company’s business. Development programs run by human resource management increase the company’s business resilience in the face of competition from firms such as Amazon. Pursuant to the achievement of the company’s overall mission and vision objectives, the human resource management at Walmart employs a stratified human resource plan comprising problems and solutions applied and developed. For instance, human resource planning is an activity reserved for the top management level. It seamlessly trickles down to the lowest levels of the company because each store is equipped with its personnel who is accountable to the top human resource management. That means that each store has its own interpretation of the human resource plan. This implies that the human resource management function of planning takes place at Walmart at different levels of the organization. In a company statement by Drew Holler and Kelly Romack, the senior vice president of people’s operations and vice president of associate and product experience, the Walmart app initially meant to manage associates’ schedules has evolved into an all-in-one app that makes their work more efficient and simpler.

Conclusion and Recommendations

The unveiling of the new Walmart app presents a grand opportunity for Walmart to differentiate itself from its competitors and create entry barriers in that particular domain of human resource technology. This new technology can compile all the complex back-office systems that include employee communications, well-being, benefits, vacations, and scheduling and compress them into one easy-to-use app. Since it fits any office-based employee, distribution, and retail, the HR manager can customize this app for specific HR functions in line with the company’s mission, vision, and strategic objectives.