Wal-Mart Throws Lifeline to Managers

Wallace Bish

Article review

April 15, 2005

Wal-mart throws lifeline to managers

Jessica Marquez

Workforce magazine - April 2005

After all the bad press and lawsuits Wal-mart is finally doing something about it. Wal-mart has decided that they need more help in how they hire and train employees. They have decided to bring in human resource specialists into districts and help with selecting, hiring, and training new associates. The new positions will be filled with human resource executives with legal backgrounds. This new concept will be started in the southern California area and if it goes well they will expand to other parts of the country.

The teams will consist of 5 people with legal backgrounds. They will be there to help managers with all human resource needs. They are there to answer questions help in selection and hiring decisions. With all the new laws and all the past problems in those areas wal-mart wants their managers to know they have someone to call and have there physically to help when needed. The example they used was if they hire a disabled person what would they need to do to best accommodate this person both too obey the law and too help this person succeed in his or her job.

The company will be watching closely to see if this is working. They will gauge its effectiveness by the turnover rate. The current turnover rate is a little below 50%. The goal is to get it too under 10%. The budgets have not yet been determined but Susan Oliver the VP of HR says that whatever the budget is if the employee turnover gets better it will be worth every penny spent.

Susan Oliver says that these improvements are not just an answer to the critics and lawsuits but a belief that if they did not do something they would lose the war in hiring and retaining good employees to the competition. She believes that this war will become much more intense as the time goes by. Being the leaders in the industry makes people expect more from them and rightly so.

This article brings a lot of good ideas to the forefront. Managers are in need of good HR minded professionals to deal with legal issues in the workplace. They must deal with the handicapped person who wants and needs the job but needs some help in doing so and from the employee that feels he or she has been sexually harassed. These are issues a company really needs a person who knows the laws well. I think that wal-mart has been and will continue to be the leaders in the industry. What they are doing with this program is proof that they are good business people who recognize the need to do something different and they knew it would take thinking out of the box to do it. Susan Oliver said it best when she said "We know that we have to be not just attractive, but really attractive as an employer of choice".

Wal-Mart Throws Lifeline to Managers

Barraged by class-action lawsuits, negative press and criticism from unions, Wal-Mart is throwing its managers and human resources staff a lifeline.

In the next several months, the Bentonville, Arkansas-based retailer is planning to hire hundreds of staff to support its in-store workers, managers and human resources administrators.

Wal-Mart also is looking at how it can build technology platforms to improve communications between employees and managers and is increasing the frequency of its employee satisfaction surveys to keep tabs on potential issues and overall morale.

"People expect more"

The initiatives come on the heels of a string of class-action sex- and wage-discrimination lawsuits and increasing union organizing activity. On top of all that, in March former Wal-Mart vice chairman Thomas Coughlin resigned from the board after the company said it had found abuses of his expense account.

Susan Oliver, Wal-Mart's senior vice president of human resources, speaking at a human resources industry conference in New York this week, says the initiative is not just a response to criticism over its employment practices. It's indicative, she says, of Wal-Mart's recognition that if it doesn't improve, it will