Here’s How Walmart Is Addressing Criticisms of Its HR Practices
As the country’s largest brick and mortar retail brand, Walmart is responsible for a vast number of employees and must constantly work to ensure this enormous workforce is properly managed and kept happy – especially considering the current labor market.
Those of you who have been following our article series in the past may remember a previous blog where we discussed this very topic. However, times have changed significantly since then which means an update to the goings on in Walmart HR would seem prudent.
Recent research would suggest that Walmart has somewhat fallen behind when it comes to the treatment of its employees. Despite its status as one of the nation’s largest employers, many of its employees are living below the poverty line. Walmart has also been accused of failing to meet expectations when it comes to promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion in its business – only a tiny proportion of management or higher roles are occupied by women for example.
In an environment where there are far more vacant positions than there are jobseekers to fill them, Walmart would do well to address these issues, or risk hemorrhaging employees to its competitors.
A Change in Thinking
As SVP of associate learning and leadership at Walmart, Lorraine Stomski’s role makes her responsible for addressing some of the issues laid out in the aforementioned research. Her main area of focus being attracting new people to the job and ensuring there are adequate career progression paths made available to all employees regardless of factors such as gender, ethnicity, etc.
"We’ve got a 2.3 million [person] workforce, but what we did see is, there was this Great Reassessment [after the pandemic], a lot of our talent stepped back and said, "Who am I? What do I want to do? Where do I want to go in the organization?” That was a great opportunity for us to look at how we were thinking about career mobility and the talent marketplace,” said Stomski.
To facilitate this, Walmart has implemented training for its store managers which better equips them to solicit and deliver feedback and have conversations with employees around career progression. Backing this up is an employee engagement survey which helps Walmart HR better understand how things are perceived from the other side of the desk. Walmart understands that it’s important for its people to see a clear path for growth and development and has witnessed the clear effect having this in place has on employee engagement.
To back this up, Walmart now has goal setting conversations on a monthly basis. This is a change from the pre-pandemic policy of "set it and forget it.” Employees have a clearer idea of what they expect from an employer now and it’s critical for Walmart to continually revisit these conversations or risk workers seeking them elsewhere.
Marginalized Communities and GenZ
Another area of focus for Walmart’s HR department in the post-pandemic workplace has been to focus on improving its diversity, equity, and inclusion figures by seeking to attract people from historically marginalized communities into roles at all levels of its business.
"We try to reach communities that wouldn’t consider college or don’t have the resources to go to college and get a degree or certificates, and "Live Better U" (LBU) was born as a result,” said Stomski. "The intention of LBU is to give debt-free education to associates. We go through non-traditional hiring paths like veterans or veterans’ spouses, and we have internships for our hourly associates to bring them into the home office.”
Similarly, Walmart has recognized the need to make its operation a more attractive career prospect for candidates from GenZ. This demographic does not generally gravitate towards retail as a career – especially one working for a massive faceless corporation such as Walmart. These young people know it’s a buyers’ market when it comes to jobs and are willing to pick and choose an employer which matches their expectations.
"The most important lever for our GenZ employees is through our purpose,” added Stomski. "I’ve been around for a while, and Walmart, to me, has the strongest purpose I’ve ever experienced, we serve our communities. One thing you’ll find in our psychometrics, is we attract employees who score highly in service orientation and altruism.”
Final Thoughts
Walmart has certainly been on the receiving end of [justified] criticism for many of its HR practices. The retail colossus appears to be taking those criticisms seriously and putting policies in place to address them, and we’ll be keeping a sharp on things to see how they develop in 2023.
Meeting the challenges of the post-pandemic workforce and ensuring a fair and equitable employee experience are sure to be part of the conversation at HR Retail 2023, being held in April at the Seattle Marriott Waterfront, WA.
Download the agenda today for more information and insights.