Walmart’s Human Resource Management

Walmart’s Human Resource Management

Introduction

Walmart is multinational retail corporation found in 1962 by Sam Walton in Rodgers, America (Wilton, 2016). It is the largest corporation in the world which runs chains of large discount department stores and warehouse stores. Significantly, they aim at making difference in the lives of customers and communities by helping them save money and live better. Due to prudence in its operations, this corporation has severally been rated as the leading among other corporations. In about 3600 stores, Walmart has employed 1.2 million workers in the United States of America, a statistic that only represents 1 percent of the total employment and 1-0 percent of retail employment in the United States (Wolfe & Pyrooz, 2014).. Moreover, it is the nation’s largest grocer with a market share equal to 19 percent. Walmart’s mission of expanding its stores in entire United States in the last two decades has been encountered by severe resistance from the local communities. However, this paper explains about Walmart’s human resource management. Ways on how Walmart manages its labor relations discussed in length. In addition, this research stretches to incorporate major roles and contributions of Walmart employees to the organizations services.

Summary

Walmart depends on its human resources team to bring out the link between fitting the right person to the right job and improving its customers’ lives and saving them money. Its human resource department works to ensure that it’s 2.2 million associates and every single member of the team is uniquely fulfilled, challenged and capable of successfully his or her role in the daily operations. In addition, the firm ensures that its human resources are supported in satisfying needs of the business and expectations. The company also addresses its human resource planning and job designing and how the two contribute to high performance of employees. Walmart achieves full human resource plan through terms of the programs, regulations and solutions used.

Most common human resource planning takes place at the top level of management of corporate human resource department. In addition to planning, Walmart also performs job design and analysis in a technical manner. The firm’s design is centralized and hierarchical but some of its levels are characterized by centralized forms. Decentralization helps in interpretation of the strategies from the corporate department. Significantly, Walmart is one of the companies that tries its level best to ensure fairness and just in job selection and recruitment. The company announces its vacancies publicly for the applicants to access. Also, the firm uses a defined procedure for acquiring new employees, based on needs and job specifications. In addition to this, Walmart implements customer’s motivation through training programs and career development program.

Human resource planning

Since Walmart is a large organization, there is always a human resource manager at each store who translates the general resource plan provided at the corporate level (Purce, 2014). This brings diversity in the interpretation of corporate resource plan at each store. According to Purce (2014), has strived to step with technology at any instant, for example the firm uses special software products to analyze changes detected in the workforce. It gets the employees or workforce data, feeds to the central database and works on it to reveal trends in the firm’s human resources.        Secondly, Walmart technically uses its information system to determine the areas which will face shortage or surplus of human resources in the case of addressing demand for employees. The workforce plans indicates the number of employees needed and the exact schedules for increased recruitment. Lastly, Walmart concentrates in its goal of ensuring adequate access to effective workers.  The company continuously hires and trains new employees, a fact that ensures no new positions are vacant and supply of human resources to make changes in employees demand is met.

Job design and analysis

The organization has corporate and top level headquarters concerned with monitoring and directing all the activities in the organization. The corporate departments have the mandate to control and rule all department in the organization (Khan et al, 2015). On the other hand, decentralized government is portrayed in the Walmart stores where each store has its own human resource body.  The purpose of human resource department at each level is to interpret strategies made by the corporate body to the individuals affected. Significantly, decentralization helps the firm in meeting to the emerging issues in the business.

Walmart uses matching approach to achieve its job design. This is perfected through interviews and surveys on administrators and applicants to determine issues and needs. Basically, Walmart’s job description is varied. It attains job description of its operations by quoting sales since the majority of its company workers are sale personnel’s. For instance, there are sale supervisors, sale managers and sale personnel among others. In addition, job specifications at Walmart are also highly varied. Most of them demand knowledge and skills in sales and marketing. For one to qualify as a sales or store manager at Walmart, he or she should hold at least a degree in sales and related discipline.

Selection process at Walmart

Walmart ensures equality, honesty and fairness in labor relations when it comes to employee’s selection. The firm achieves this through applicant’s academic and moral qualifications (Clardy, 2013). Also, applicant’s ability to execute sales and human resource management tasks are highly considered. Some of the steps followed in the selection process;

Step one

The first consideration on applicant is his background. In this case, educational background, work experience and personal interest are considered. Walmart checks on these qualifications so as to determine applicant’s potentiality to execute the demands of the job.

Step two

In this step; skills, knowledge and ability of and an applicant to satisfy needs and standards of the job are required. So, any applicant in Walmart must have adequate knowledge and skills to meet the job position.

Step Three

Walmart highly considers person-organization fit. The values of the applicant should not conflict with that of the organization. The qualities and background of an applicant should at best much with the organization’s environment.

Step four

Any employee to work with Walmart must be willing to work with the organization. Also, person’s missions in the workplace should go hand in hand with those of the organization.

Performance strategy

Walmart performance planning involves appraisal system whereby feedback to employees on their performance levels is provided (Rothenberg et al, 2015). In addition, employees are also provided with feedback stating how they should improve their performance.  Employees’ performance levels are also analyzed by use of HR software. According to Rothenberg et al, (2015), all these activities help the human resource management to establish goals, objectives and job opportunities of Walmart. The firm attains its performance by use of the following measures; efficiency and effectiveness of the process, quality of customer service and productivity of sales personnel among others.

Employee training

Walmart uses needs analysis to estimate how best a job fits an employee and how they meet business environment. Human resource managers use needs analysis to check on the employees’ satisfaction on of the firm’s needs and requirements. After conducting analysis at different departments, the corporate human resource department makes decisions based on the needs and sets new strategies based on the collected data (Cummings et al, 2016). Basically, training at Walmart focuses on the performance of sales personnel. Mostly, online training is delivered but in contrast to this, the human resource department prefers face to face delivery in comparison to online delivery. Lastly, report on the feedback of customers adds to the information required by the human resource managers to evaluate on the employees’ training programs.

Career development

Walmart regularly conducts training programs to increase workers abilities, skills and knowledge in the workplace (Das, 2016). This being not enough, Walmart contributes to the employees’ career development by sponsoring its employees to attend seminars and workshops based on their fields of specification. According to Das, (2016) Walmart develops its career opportunities through expansion plans and job positions. Initiatives of the career development at Walmart is instituted through supervisors of the stores and human resource managers.

Strengths and weaknesses in managing labor relations

The major reason behind Walmart’s success in labor management is its Corporate -level strategy. The firm believes and concentrates on single business which depicts that more than 95% of its revenue is obtained solely from its grocery business (Truss et al, 2012). . This advantage obstructs Walmart from considering the concept of diversification and an idea of competition at the international arena.

On the other hand, Walmart has been aiming at decentralization on the bases of opening stores in many areas, a fact that it enhances career development. However, its efforts on the same have been fruitless since its  watchdogs argues that it will result to increased road congestion, degradation of environment, possible erosion of historical culture and urban sprawl among other factors (Kearney et al, 2014). Lastly, development of technology affects human resource department in a way that it would replace some man power resulting to constant recruitment and trainings hence more money.

Conclusion

Walmart human resource department and the entire organization’s stakeholders should use an incentive plan to perfect incentives for low ranking employees. Secondly, Walmart’s Human resource management can upgrade incentives of the sales personnel instead of focusing on supervisors and managers. This will have a positive effect on the firm’s performance. Notably, Walmart gives incentives of less degree to rank-and- file employees resulting to greater effect on managers. The organization can avoid this imbalance by emphasizing equally to incentives on managers and rank-and-file employees.

References

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Clardy, A. (2013). A general framework for performance management systems: Structure, design,            and analysis. Performance Improvement, 52(2), 5-15.

Cummings, T. G., & Worley, C. G. (2014). Organization development and change. Cengage         learning.

Das, A. (2016). Employee recruitment and development process at maf Shoes Ltd.

Flamholtz, E. G. (2012). Human resource accounting: Advances in concepts, methods and            applications. Springer Science & Business Media.

Noe, R. A., Wilk, S. L., Mullen, E. J., & Wanek, J. E. (2014). Employee Development: Issues in   Construct Definition and Investigation ofAntecedents. Improving Training Effectiveness in   WorkOrganizations, ed. JK Ford, SWJ Kozlowski, K. Kraiger, E. Salas, and MS Teachout        (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997), 153-189.

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Purce, J. (2014). The impact of corporate strategy on human resource management. New    Perspectives on Human Resource Management (Routledge Revivals), 67.

Rothenberg, S., Hull, C. E., & Tang, Z. (2015). The impact of human resource management on     corporate social performance strengths and concerns. Business & Society,      0007650315586594.

Truss, C., Mankin, D., & Kelliher, C. (2012). Strategic human resource management. Oxford       University

Wilton, N. (2016). An introduction to human resource management. Sage.

Annotations

Wolfe, S. E., & Pyrooz, D. C. (2014). Rolling back prices and raising crime rates? The Walmart    effect on crime in the United States. British Journal of Criminology, 54(2), 199-221.

In this book of Britrish journal of criminology, Wolfe and Pyrooz attempts to explain the possible effects of Walmart opening of new stores. The two authors asserts that opening of Target Kumart stores in 1962 had an effect on the American retail and landscape.

Wolfe and Pyrooz are very descriptive on their research of Walmart’s effects on crime. The authors are aware of causes of diversification of stores based on location of stores in counties. They supplement their research with scholarly sources of crime effects in America.

Xie, I., & Joo, S. (2012). Factors affecting the selection of search tactics: Tasks, knowledge,         process, and systems. Information Processing & Management, 48(2), 254-270.

In this book, Xie and Joo attempts to ascertain whether searchers’ learning styles can influence application of search tactics. The authors base their argument on Walmart Corporation and specifically about the Knowledge, ability and skills of employees to meet available job needs.

Experienced authors, Xie and Joo are aware of their skills and knowledge in search learning styles and tactics explained in this text. The authors are forthcoming on tasks, knowledge and processes of Walmart employees in job specification