Walmart Human Resources Workforce Plan

[Author Name(s), First M. Last, Omit Titles and Degrees]

Southern New Hampshire University

Course: OL 655

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Abstract

Human capital is one of the most tangible assets for an organization than the other resources. In today’s competitive environment the environment in which they operate is based on knowledge workers and customer service orientation. Human resource planning has become central to the development and success of an organization. Thus, a business plan must have an appropriate workforce mix to ensure they work in close alignment with the forecast to fulfill organizational objectives within the projected timeline.

 For a large-scale human resource organization like Walmart who boasts of having the largest workforce, the importance of workforce planning and data-driven decision making becomes customary. It is the core aspect of every business venture to leverage and maximally utilize the capabilities of their workforce. Walmart must undertake a holistic view of their current strategies take steps to make investments in the e-commerce infrastructure, employee training and support as well as technological innovations.

The purpose of this assignment is to create a Human Resource workforce plan for Walmart to help meet its strategic initiatives. Here we will examine the current state of the workforce to identify the contingencies using which a workforce plan can be developed to bridge the gaps. The significance of this workforce plan is to describe the initiatives which will help future employees adopt the best approach to drive talent development and resolve the HR planning discrepancies to maximize their organizational performance.    

 

 

 

 

Contents

Abstract 2

Introduction. 5

Competency Gaps. 6

Current State. 6

Current Workforce. 6

Competency Gap Identification. 7

Strategy. 7

Strategies. 9

Talent Development 9

Employee Goals. 10

Organizational Goals. 11

Training. 11

Needs. 11

Integrated. 12

Recommendations. 13

Forecast 13

Growth. 13

Reduction. 15

Succession Planning. 17

Evaluation. 17

Rationale. 18

Conclusion. 18

Opportunities. 18

Challenges. 19

References. 21

 

 

 

Introduction

Walmart Inc (NYSE: WMT), a private American multinational retailer which was founded in 1962 as a small single discount store by Sam Walton with the idea of selling more for less. Today it has grown to be one of the largest retailers in the world with the largest employee base of over 2.3 million associates (Walmart Inc., n.d.). It operates on various segments across the globe offering an assortment of merchandise and services with its “Everyday Low Price’ (EDLP) Strategy. Walmart operates as a network of neighborhood markets with divisions like Sam Club, Walmart International, membership-only warehouse clubs, and other establishments such as discount stores, supercenters under 48 banners in 24 countries. It provides a wide array of products and services from groceries, furniture to financial services such as money transfer, Walmart Credit Card and MoneyCard, Gift cards, monthly payment plans, and other money services (Walmart Inc., n.d.). Its community outreach focuses on providing customer satisfaction, involving itself with local community services, and providing scholarships while emphasizing sustainability in its operation.

Walmart exemplifies Sam Walton’s vision of leadership through its service which its leaders have carried throughout generations with a prime focus on making lives better and affordable for its customers and communities. It is the ideals of Sam Walton that drove the decisions of the company in the past 59 years, making it the face of the Retail Industry as the largest Multinational retailing corporation by revenue as we know it today.  Their commitment to providing high-quality retail goods, affordable food to groceries, and other essential products and services highlight their purpose to save people's money and help them live better.

Walmart has evolved over the past 59 years in retail innovation adapting to the dynamics by leveraging new technologies, divesting businesses, and investing in new initiatives. They’re currently aiming to galvanize climate action across the retail and consumer goods sector by improving the sustainability of the product supply chain by accelerating its transition to become a 100% industrially compostable private brand packaging by 2025.  The pandemic challenged the organization to adapt for more equitable and sustainable outcomes, changing its strategic goals to become an omnichannel, regenerative company.

      Current State:

Competency Gaps

Current State

Walmart houses 2.3 million associates worldwide with 1.6 million associates just in the U.S.  After the global public health emergency brought by COVID 19, Walmart emphasized employee training, improving its e-commerce in their omnichannel strategy along with increasing its supercenter footprint. Walmart’s dedicated training program ‘Walmart Academy’ trains its employees in change management, leadership, and retail skills. On average, a store manager earns about $170,000 in a year mentoring their associates, helping them foster skills to fulfill customer needs. On the other hand, the average total hourly compensation in the U.S is $19.50. Walmart had promoted over 300,000 U.S associates to jobs of higher pay and greater responsibility, hiring 500,000 new associates. Teams of cross-trained associates are changing the leadership and job roles enhancing the skills by employing a team-based structure.

Current Workforce

The pandemic changed the nature of business, increasing the need to make new business models in the post-pandemic era. It has become imperative to address product and supply chain visibility while ensuring sustainability to increase consumer awareness. There are visible gaps in the employee's critical digital and cognitive capabilities, emotional skills, adaptability, and resilience. The pandemic has shown a shift towards e-commerce from contemporary brick-and-mortar sales. Increasing employee turnover rate shows the need for adaptability, resilience, and emotional skills. Walmart systematically identifies and measures the gaps using standards to measure performance. Walmart uses key measures to measure the quality of service using order defect rate, on-time shipment rate, valid tracking rate, quality of customer service, productivity, and effectiveness of the processes.

Competency Gap Identification

Wal-Mart’s human resource management uses a performance evaluation system, gap analysis, and KSM to determine the extent of the gap in competencies and evaluate their employees on performance (Bao et al., 2021). This helps in the identification of the competency gaps in the workforce.  The HR managers regularly evaluate performance using performance interviews, providing feedback on the performance.

The HR department uses recommended micro-tailored appraisal to assess the role, responsibility, and performance of every individual and team. The assessed results were then used by the company to develop efficiency and effectiveness.  It is also a measurement against the productivity of workers. And therefore, the company uses the system to determine the objectives, job specification, goals and job responsibility that varies from employees to employees.

Strategy

• Internal Strategy: The human resource department of the company favors the promotional activity of hourly sales employees to the post of manager. The on-the-job trainees are taken as internal recruitment process within the company. Also, the company recruits few trainees in sales and marketing positions. the transfer takes place within the organization to fill the gaps within the working culture of the organization. The trained employees often fill the gaps within the workforce both on short term and long-term basis. The human resource department of the company has different approaches for recruitment. Based on the present state of the company, the transfer to a job position temporarily is achievable.
• External strategy: The company accepts suitable applications outside its business to fill the vacancy gap that exists within their human resources.  The largest source of external recruitment for the company is through job advertisements. Meanwhile, the website of the company is another way to reach out to the respondents for jobs. The company showcases regularity in its job posting for the aspirants that can add value to the firm. The company also opts for the campus hiring process. Walmart entered into an agreement with APU, which now provides academic credit to the employees of the company based on their performance and employment reviews. However, Walmart does not prefer recruiting previous applicants and is always looking for fresh talents to fill the gaps in the workforce. The external source of recruiting is beneficial for the company as it helps in the expansion of the cost-effectiveness of the recruitment. The previous applicants received by Walmart in past are evaluated but do not account for fresh or new recruitments.

Strategies

Talent Development

Walmart reduces its business failure by curtailing the organizational gap between the business strategies with respect to the HR strategies. Walmart continues to design and invest in programs for the development of its associates to boost the career of its employee at the company with philanthropic commitments to accelerate mobility across the company. The talent development strategy focuses on inclusion, wellbeing, growth, and digital enablement, accelerating their professional development to help make retail a gateway towards mobility. Inclusive opportunity aims to increase their wages, helping them advance in their careers to bring organizational success

Walmart provides both on-the-job and off-the-job training to its employee.  Job rotation is employed at the company for on-the-job training when the trainees are rotated within two or more departments in the initial years of their job. The company optimizes the mentoring session from the seniors and the existing leaders since the organizational leaders share their expertise, knowledge, and skills with the new employees. While the off-the-job training inculcates for web-based learning, classroom training for improving the capability and competency of the employees for enhancing the organizational effectiveness. They have been assisting in virtual reality (VR) training simulators to help employees combat circumstances related to customer service, management, and the Black Friday promotion. They also monitor the performance of every trainee.

Talent Development revolves around three fundamental strategies:

1.Generating and sharing insights to create opportunity into the retail sector: The investment of efforts resulted in improved investment for the entry-level retail workers which helped in reducing the turnover ratio and added value to the organization. The skills required for gaining an edge in the competitive market could be identified and improved. It also helped in creating an opportunity to fund the research and development areas by employers and key stakeholders.

2.Creating an effective and innovative approach for the training and development programs for employees: The innovative approach employed by Walmart at all levels helps in filling the technological gaps thereby helping it gain a competitive advantage over its competitors in the industry.

3.Collaborating with various sectors to improve the engagement ratio among employees: The resultant effect of the shared value approach being improvisation in the skill development of the workers.  This helps in adding more partnerships for the company providing more economic benefits to the business. Upskilling the workers through a training and development program will help in mitigating the turnover rates with the improved engagement of employees at work.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   

Employee Goals

The company provides employee compensation benefits like 401(k) contribution up to 6% of employee’s salary through automatic payroll withholding to help them match their contribution to the 401(k) plan. They have also partnered for providing educational benefits with the Live Better U program and Guild Education to offer supply chain management for just $1 per day with debt-free high-quality degrees in business (Bao et al., 2021). They help the associates with their college credits for training where the employees have gained over 317 million USD. Other benefits like exclusive discounts are offered as travel discounts, entertainment services, and the benefits not available at their stores.

Organizational Goals

Walmart is shifting towards being an omnichannel regenerative company to deal with changing dynamics of the business. The pricing strategy of Walmart includes the reduced cost for a high-quality product which pressurizes the competitors in the industry and makes the entry and survivability of new entrants in the industry more difficult. The continuous involvement of the HR team to involve their leaders and employees under training and development programs ensures better productivity at work, empowerment of employees, synergetic teamwork, and better expense control. Training and development also help in building an improved work culture which eliminates and reduces the business risk. Sam Walton’s Walmart focused on providing the highest satisfaction to its customers which involved the duty and role of the HR department for effective decision making. Walmart uses a crossdocking JIT system to ensure products are delivered to the warehouses and distributed without being in stock. This allows Walmart to avoid relocation and inventory costs parallelly, prices fall in the sales process below the industry average. This cost-saving then transfers to its customers at low prices which enables them to avoid recurrent discounts keeping the price in check, hence making sales more predictable. This supply chain design helps Walmart maintain its strategy to supply goods and services at a competitive price.

Training

Needs

The priorities for companies change with changing market dynamics. With the current global health and economic crisis, the workplace dynamics changed, changing the employee development and training needs, shaping the future of work (Balliester & Elsheikhi, 2018). Throughout the global disruption and transition, demographics changes, nonlinear career continuum, widening skill gaps, and resource scarcity emerged as major trends which influenced how businesses develop and engage with their employees.  The staggering ramifications with the advent of the fourth industrial revolution have made businesses struggle, thus the need for upskilling and reskilling is prevalent with the need for workforce transformation. Walmart is well-positioned to leverage its assets and establish lines of business, reflecting innovation and agility to keep up with the changing dynamics of digital disruption. The need to invest in the development and well-being of their employees was instrumental for organizational success as well as to ensure safety at all levels of the organization (Schulz, Martin & Meyer, 2017, pp.1; Noe et al., 2017). With high turnover, there was a focus on skills training. Thus, Walmart needs training and development of its employee targeted at the front-line managers and service employees such that they can be prepared for any additional economic shift. This will help in closing the identified internal skill gaps. Today there is an evident need to improve Inclusive leadership skills, trade skills, Digital Literacy, and Soft Skills. Labor Statistics Bureau of the United States report an increment in the job openings for trade skill positions, whereas the World Economic Forum reports the changing digital landscape which created over 133 million job roles (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics; Schwab, 2018). These skills are instrumental and without skilled employees’ organizations will struggle to stay relevant in this fast-moving competitive digital marketplace.

Integrated

Walmart supports its employees by investing in their education and development. These needs are well-integrated with the new training and development program. Investments are made in employee education and development with ‘Walmart’s live better U’ in partnership with Penn Foster in their education benefits program. This program offers employees an opportunity to complete higher education debt-free with room for educational and professional development. Walmart in addition to job development focused on cross-training and mobility of the store associates and advanced training through Walmart Academies which combines immersive teaching integrating technology, classroom training, and ongoing coaching on the sales floor.

The current human resource strategy of the company is to focus on inclusion, well-being, growth, and digital enablement. Since retail is a powerful source for inclusive economic opportunity, Walmart aims to improve equity and provides an opportunity to support the mission and strengthen the business goals. The company believes its associates to be the driving force for its success. Thus, the human resource strategy is integrated with the company with the business strategy. 

Recommendations

Forecast

Growth

Workforce needs are forecasted based on organizational strategic goals in relation to company growth and recommendations are given to alleviate gaps.

The demographics of the workforce continue to change and Walmart’s need for the future labor pool changes accordingly. Covid 19 facilitated economic and technological transformation, exacerbating skills, inequities, and literacy that already existed. This contributed to the displacement of more than low-wage workers to a higher wage bracket occupation demanding different skills.  62% of service workers in Walmart have limited literacy skills with about 74% workers with limited literacy skills. In the United States, about 23% of sales personnel in retail are at risk of losing jobs to automation with around 24% of cashiers losing jobs due to automation. Walmart has a demand for informed-skilled workers and has shifted to increase its full-time worker capacity due to the growing pickup and delivery business to provide both to the needs of fulfillment centers and retail spaces. Walmart faces the urgency to upskill and reskill its employees for the future due to the convergence of various forces.  With the changing behavior of consumers backed by the technological change of nature of the work, Walmart as the largest employer attracts people from all backgrounds to thrive in the ever-changing omnichannel system. Walmart will need more retail workers due to the anticipating demand of the holiday season. Walmart must create pathways for future workers to develop skills enforcing workforce development, strengthening local economies. Walmart will need employees with in-demand skills and formal education to fit into roles that demand leadership and responsibility. Qualified talents are needed for mid-level jobs whereas workers with limited education can serve as a potential talent pool as the frontline workers in Walmart. This can be a cost-effective way to grow and retain talent.  Walmart must also have low barriers to employment, countering the degree inflation to value work experience and the relevant skill.

To provide ongoing growth, development, and learning opportunities for its employees Walmart must forecast the needs of its employees. Walmart must invest to accelerate digital transformation and improve employee's access to digital tools to drive business. Ensuring employee well-being, growth and development will help in closing the skills gap bringing in meaningful changes in the business in the future.

Recommendations

• Large retailers like Walmart have a large number of front-line staff in sales. The inception of covid 19 has transformed the world, disrupting economies and businesses across the globe. This has public health emergency has adversely affected the management of organizations and made handling the workforce a daunting challenge. Thus, there is an obvious need to train the front-line staff to assume different roles to effectively handle any future crisis. This is because most of the sales personnel have little to no education to help in the management process. Thus, Walmart must take the initiative to develop and implement development programs such as cross-training for front-line workers like cashiers, sales associates, or anyone aspiring to be managers. This will ensure the employees develop broader retail expertise.
• Use data-driven accurate retail promotion for better forecasting accuracy to drive higher availability and have less risk of excess stock.  Machine learning can be used to improve retail promotion accuracy in forecasting.
• To challenge the ability of the employee to schedule a test or assignment-based activities outside the current role to improve the decision-making ability.
• Retailers in the omnichannel network must provide a good customer experience across the channels by virtual ringfencing at warehouses and distribution centers.
• Improve inventory visibility to avoid markdowns to make better decisions in the future and place an order based on the forecast of the assumed price.
• Integrate outset knowledge and broad expertise in product development by engaging in social and behavioral science.

Reduction

There is a persistent economic miscalculation in the business forecast due to bias. Accurate market predictions determine the supply and demand activity for the future. Forecast reduction is essential to prevent overstocking. It leverages the inventory management system, minimizing the cost of inventory. Walmart uses Nvidia’s GPU-based demand forecasting for evaluating its historical sales data. For reduction in bias, the accuracy of the data must be taken into account while making the predictions. Walmart information systems provide data on current inventory along with the rate of sale of the goods to its suppliers. Suppliers have direct access to the real-time data using which they forecast when and which items are to be sent to the stores. This minimizes the delay in the movement of the inventory across the supply chain along with minimizing the inventory management cost. Walmart’s cross-docking JIT system helps to monitor the fluctuations in the demand in the market using which they can forecast the inventory size. This minimizes the inventory size making it easier to manage and builds operational efficiency. To efficiently carry out the smooth operation the workforce needs to be skilled to effectively carry out inventory management from suppliers end to being transported to the stores. Moreover, employees positioned to analyze the data must be capable of implementing various statistical data analysis forecasting metrics. Root cause analysis and effective supply chain management. 

Walmart forecasts its inventory performance using performance indicators namely- inventory turnover, stock out rate, and inventory size.

Recommendation for forecast reduction

• Reduce the supply chain inefficiencies by improving the forecast accuracy, forecast expectations, product lead times, inventory turnover, and percentage out of stocks.
• Design a common forecast providing analysis of sales and order forecast to eliminate common problems that arise during operation.
• Improve category management and customer purchasing behavior.
• Provide training for inventory management and decision-making capabilities. The training program may include simulation which involves changing market dynamics to train employees for real-life problems.
• Creation of a workforce management system where a subject matter specialist develops and updates statistical software.

 

Succession Planning

Evaluation

The NCG is responsible for the evaluation of potential successors and recommendations to the Board in Walmart. They characterize the future needs of the committee keeping in mind the missions, goals, and workforce development. This shapes the mission and direction of the organization, maintaining a strong positive relationship between the Board and the executive creating sustainability. Members of the board maintain stability and continuity of the leadership both at the board and management level.

Retiring baby boomers negatively influence the availability of talent by increasing the talent gap (Tunanidis,2018). Succession planning mitigates that gap by employing a structured process to identify key individuals to fill positions in the organization (Oduwusi,2018). It is integrated with the workforce development plan providing an exit strategy. Gap analysis can determine the competency gaps for each position. (Ibarra, 2005, pp.5). Walmart has always maintained a high corporate governance standard for the long term. Sam Waltons’ vision has guided Walmart into the future, transforming and focusing on a more holistic framework on sustainability. Walmart follows a top-down approach for its succession planning. Sustainability relates to succession planning as it encompasses leadership, resources, culture, and strategy. Poor succession planning has a negative influence on sustainability (Bottomley,2018).

Rationale

Walmart must invest in leadership development such as succession planning as this nurtures the right talent, at the right time to support future success. It must be paired with development activities and mentoring program where direct feedback from the board executives and leadership coach will bridge the knowledge gap. Key positions can be identified using retirement forecasts and turnover rates. Public and public sectors must collaborate to help in nationwide upskilling and skill-based hiring. Emphasis must be on state-level systems and strategic investments to include advanced approaches to develop incumbent workers and implement service sector upskilling programs within the local labor market to fill the competency gaps.

Conclusion

Opportunities

Walmart has transitioned to become an omnichannel regenerative company for which they must maximize the utilization of human resources to achieve maximum benefits and competitive advantage in the industry.

1. . Inclusion: The company can provide an inclusive opportunity to the employees by providing them career opportunities and prospects. This will lead to employee engagement and acquisition of new talent which can help in delivering the omnichannel customer proposition.
2. Well-being: By providing compensation and employee benefits like medical coverage and sick leave, the company can improve the job experience to attract fresh talent.
3. Training in digital citizenship: For evolving in customer proposition, Walmart ensures digital trust commitments to its users. The company provides training to its employees in the areas related to the use of data tools, sharing of personal information of the customers, managing of data responsibly, and data privacy. This helps in enhancing the customer relationship with the employees as well as the organization.
4. Investing in future leaders: By investing in leadership programs, the leaders can exploit the core competencies of human resources to achieve company goals and vision and revolve around their growth forecast.
5. Cross-sector collaboration: It requires stakeholders to work together to develop innovative approaches to build the skills of the associates. This will enhance the public-private partnership.

 

Challenges

The company faces 7Cs overcoming challenges related to the management of human resources:

1. Challenges from front-Line Sales Staff: The underlying challenge lies in the planning, designing, and conducting of the extensive training to the staff.
2. Challenges of Employee Productivity and Job assurance: Due to the adverse business environment, it is difficult to provide job security to every individual employee. This, in turn, hampers the productivity of the employees and hampers the success of the organization.
3. Challenges of Employees’ Health: The present Covid-19 situation has ensured challenges within the organizations relating to maintenance of the health of the employees such that they carry on their jobs efficiently and effectively.
4. Challenges of Uncertainty: The stakeholders are facing uncertainty due to the imprudent plan of action of the companies. Few other uncertain challenges involve the reduction in the working hours of the employees, job losses, and ensuring that the employees remain motivated.
5. Challenges of Communication: The company has to win trust and confidence by avoiding confusion and must remain in communication with its associates.
6. Challenges of Online sales: Brick-and-mortar stores always have to face stiff competition from the e-commerce players. Thus, educating every employee at once to cope with the situation is not practical. This is also leading to a loss in productivity of work at an increasing speed.

 

Human capital is one of the most tangible assets for an organization than the other resources. In today’s competitive environment the environment in which they operate is based on knowledge workers and customer service orientation. The purpose of this assignment is to create a Human Resource workforce plan for Walmart to help meet its strategic initiatives. Here we will examine the current state of the workforce to identify the contingencies using which a workforce plan can be developed to bridge the gaps. The significance of this workforce plan is to describe the initiatives which will help future employees adopt the best approach to drive talent development and resolve the HR planning discrepancies to maximize their organizational performance.   

 

Current State:

Competency Gaps

Current State

Walmart houses 2.3 million associates worldwide with 1.6 million associates just in the U.S.  After the global public health emergency brought by COVID 19, Walmart emphasized employee training, improving its e-commerce in their omnichannel strategy along with increasing its supercenter footprint.

Current Workforce

The pandemic changed the nature of business, increasing the need to make new business models in the post-pandemic era. It has become imperative to address product and supply chain visibility while ensuring sustainability to increase consumer awareness.

Competency Gap Identification

Wal-Mart’s human resource management uses a performance evaluation system, gap analysis, and KSM to determine the extent of the gap in competencies and evaluate their employees on performance.

Strategy

We have classified the strategies into two groups:

•          Internal Strategy

•          External strategy

 

Strategies

• Talent Development
• Employee Goals
• Organizational Goals

 

Training

• Needs

The priorities for companies change with changing market dynamics. With the current global health and economic crisis, the workplace dynamics changed, changing the employee development and training needs, shaping the future of work.

• Integrated

Investments are made in employee education and development with ‘Walmart’s live better U’ in partnership with Penn Foster in their education benefits program. This program offers employees an opportunity to complete higher education debt-free with room for educational and professional development

Recommendations

1. To train the front-line staff to assume different roles to effectively handle any future crisis.
2. To drive higher availability and have less risk of excess stock.
3. To make better decisions in the future and place an order based on the forecast of the assumed price