HR 5

Table of Contents 1. Executive Summary 3 2. Employee Engagement Strategies 3 3. Global Talent Management 4 4. Corporate Social Responsibility 5 5. Human Resource Technology 6 6. Employment Law and Human Rights Issues 7 7. Emerging Trends in Human Resource Management 9 8. Human Capital Challenges in the 21st Century 10 9. Best Practices in Human Resource Management 11 References 13

This is a professional report based on the assessment of the current human resource environment for Walmart Inc. Walmart is a retail discount store operating a chain of hypermarkets, grocery stores, and discount stores in America and Canada, and United Kingdom and Japan and parts of India and Brazil. Headquartered in Arkansas, Walmart operates more than 4,000 stores and employees more than a million workers. This assessment is based on the employee engagement strategies that Walmart adopts its global talent management programs and corporate social responsibility. The human resource technology that the company uses and issues relating to the employment law and human rights that have in the past dogged the company are assessed alongside the emerging trends in human resource management and human capital challenges in the 21st century and how the bearing they have on Walmart are assessed. The assessment concludes by giving some of the best practices in human resource management.

The employee engagement strategy at Walmart can be considered as affinity. Under this strategy, the employees lack affinity and they put the physical effort at the workplace but reserve their mental and psychological efforts. Workers of this type seek comfort elsewhere (home or other social places like church) (Fortune 500 , 2015). This is exhibited by the high propensity of the non-unionized workforce to unionize indicating that they are dissatisfied with the terms and conditions of the workplace. The reported cases of industrial injuries are a further testimony to the fact that the employee engagement is wanting in terms of affinity (Fortune 500 , 2015).

Walmart has put in place a number of global talent development programs. These programs entail education and training in support of career advancement for its global workforce talents. Walmart runs programs such as Mentor Me, Leadership Academy, and Business Leadership Series all of which impacts its global associates (Walmart Inc., 2016). The company’s Global Learning Management System gives it delivery and assessment as well as reporting on the wide scope of its associates’ learning activities. Through its Executive Development Session, the company’s officers get exposure to a number of speakers and thought leaders such as authors, business leaders and professors and they get enlightened on topics such as collaboration, innovation, and business ethics (Walmart Inc., 2016).

Walmart has a Mentor Me Program which empowers associates to participate actively in the development and provision of resources so as to increase the connectivity and to promote effective mentorships. The program is aimed at creating as well as sharing of diverse knowledge as well as experience around the globe. In order to attract, develop, and retain diverse talents across the globe, Walmart has in place the Summer Internship Program which attracts students drawn from a number of colleges and universities to provide an exceptional experience and to discourage skills mismatch between talents and workplace expectations. Other global talent management programs are the Global Leadership Development, Walmart International Academy, and the High-potential programs all of which aim at raising skills across the globe (Walmart Inc., 2016).

From the year 2005, Walmart became active in addressing its global impact by adopting a Sustainability Program which saw it begin to revamp everything ranging from building materials all the way to light bulbs. Walmart has, in its desire to become more eco-friendly, designed more stores in order to make it more energy efficient and also to produce reduced volumes of greenhouse gases. On top of these efforts, the company has equipped a good number of its stores with solar panels, set up fuel-saving technologies in a good fleet of its vehicles, optimized its routing system in order to cut down on its fuel use, and also realigned its energy consumption orientation towards wind energy (SHRM Foundation, n.d).

In the company’s Global Responsibility Report of 2013, it was clearly stated that it is the company’s responsibility to make the world a better place to live in the face of its growing global operations. In this respect, Walmart has come up with and implanted a couple of initiatives targeting four principal areas: social responsibility, local responsibility, environment responsibility, and company responsibility (Fortune 500 , 2015).

The social responsibility initiative of the company aimed at promoting the economic empowerment of women and giving more Americans lead hunger-free lives and to get access to healthy foodstuff. The local responsibility initiative is aimed at making microloans, promoting local farming activities and assisting with reliefs in case of disasters, and implementing nutritional programs in schools. The environmental responsibility initiative is aimed at reducing energy consumption as well as plastic bag waste, getting rid of landfill waste, and imposing more stringent guidelines for product sustainability. The company responsibility initiative comprised stakeholder engagement, worker safety, promoting basic values, and corporate compliance and governance (Walmart Inc., 2016).

Walmart has a number of successes in each of these areas. For instance, Walmart Foundation and Walmart contributed in excess of $1 billion to charities worldwide. Current the company and its foundation are providing training as well as career opportunities for more than 1 million women all over the globe. In terms of its energy efficiency pursuit, the company’s use of renewable energy sources for electricity stands at 21 per cent. The company is planning to hire in excess of 10,000 United States veterans in the next five years (Fortune 500 , 2015). In terms of diversity, the female members of the workforce account for close to 28 per cent of the company’s corporate officers which is close to twice the average of the number for the Fortune 500 companies.

The human resource technology at Walmart is modern and state-of-the-art. The company runs an integrated human resource information system (HRIS) which captures all the necessary information about its human resources. The information includes the areas of deployment, age and experience, skills and competence, medical condition, and contact information among others. HRIS enables the human resource management to query the app based on the nature of demand. This makes redeployment and realignment and raising internal skill requirement easy because competent personnel can be raised quickly to meet the labor deployment dynamics (Walmart Inc., 2016).

The HRIS is developed to meet the technological requirement of the stores and to keep the largest human resource data for its stores across the United States. This has been boosted by its competent ICT staff which is able to build better and faster as well as more efficient programs to support all the human resource management practice requirements of the company. At the centre of Wal-Mart’s human resource technology success is a sprightly, innovative culture which is backed by the Fortune 1 Support (Walmart Inc., 2016).

Walmart is, like many other stores in the United States, has been criticized for its employment and human rights policies. Many stories have been raised around the company’s minimum wage violations a couple of questionable workplace practices despite high net income reports of way above $10 billion in the last two consecutive financial years. Similar concerns have been raised on the adequacy of employee healthcare cover, exploitation of workers, and the stance of the retail store on anti-unionization of the workforce. Statistics has it that the company is receiving, on average, 5,000 lawsuits per year being an equivalent of 17 lawsuits per day. This rate is twice as high as that average lawsuit reporting frequency in all the Fortune 500 companies (Walmart Inc., 2016).

A look back at the last two financial years gives an unattractive picture of the company. The release of the film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price points out that Walmart can afford to give its clients the high discounts at the expense of its workforce and ugly employment practices (Fortune 500 , 2015). This saw the company’s head of Working Families for Wal-Mart advocacy group resign due to his failure to get satisfied by the practices of the company.

Walmart has in many occasions been marked as a loather of unions. This is demonstrated by its decision to close Quebec stores after the workers there had unionized. It however cited economic reasons, a reason that was later rejected by the Quebec labor relations. In January 2015, the Court of Appeals (8th circuit), handed Walmart employees at Arkansas a victory and this further reaffirmed that Walmart had engagements that were considerable anti-union (Fortune 500 , 2015).

Walmart has also been accused on a number of occasions of exploiting workers. For instance, in September 2014, the International Labor Rights Fund filed a suit against Walmart citing its failure to implement minimum wage in a number of countries. Other accusations included the decision of the company to punish union activities and to deny employees the required overtime. It has been alleged that the workers have reported physical assaults by supervisors (Fortune 500 , 2015). In other cases the company has been accused of failing to provide safe working environment for workers as a report had it that the workers had recorded a number of industrial injuries due to lack of gloves.

On wage law violations the company is on record being accused by about 116,000 employees of flouting a California law which requires employers to provide employees with an unpaid half-hour lunch break for all employees working for at least 6 hours a day. In terms of healthcare, Walmart is on record not respecting the healthcare system (Walmart Inc., 2016). One way is through discouraging unhealthy people from taking up jobs at the store. To accomplish this, the company ensures that all jobs entail an element of a physical activity, orienting its hiring practices toward part-time workers, cutting down on 401(K) contributions, and setting up health clinics in its stores.

There are a number of emerging trends in the human resource management practice. Among the changing trends is the abolishment of performance reviews. Companies had in the recent past spent time and money and other resources in carrying out staff appraisal and reviews. Realization has it that these are increasingly becoming outdated given the judgmental bias with which the persons charged with the responsibility of appraising have judged their subordinates (Walmart Inc., 2016). Secondly, the organization chart is fading away fast given the increasing complexity of the workforce. With organizations going global and the workforce is increasingly getting complex with companies hiring highly flexible workforce, the organization chart is becoming increasing worthless.

The other trend is that privacy is increasingly becoming less of an issue. Technological advancement has come up with a new generation of ‘people trackers’. Some companies have come up with gadgets that analyze tones and voices to determine the callers who are disappointed and angry and to switch such calls to the most capable centre staff. This means that privacy is becoming less of an issue. Also, the workplace is getting mobile, mobile, and mobile. Communication is almost perfectly changing from the office landlines to hand-held gadgets and the human resource managers at Walmart have to change with the dynamics to adopt the apps (SHRM Foundation, n.d). The other issue is that robots have entered the boardroom and can perform exactly what the personnel can do.

Among the leading human capital challenges in the 21st century is the fact that the workforce is increasingly getting perfect information on matters relating to the workforce practices of the employers, economies are increasingly getting integrated economically making labor mobility painless, the increased unionization, and the enlightenment and consciousness of the consumers to the human resource practices of the employers (SHRM Foundation, n.d).

Employers and the human resource managers must act with the knowledge that employees have in mind perfect information about the practices of various employers across the globe. The high level of technological development across the globe has exposed the members of the workforce to a variety of employers and they can easily shift their human resource services to employers who offer considerably better employment terms. Thus, human resource managers need to be conscious of this fact. Secondly, world over, economies are increasingly getting integrated as the globe is becoming one big village. In this pursuit, countries are removing barriers to trade such as the movement of human capital (SHRM Foundation, n.d). This means that unsatisfactory human resource practices can easily trigger exodus of key employees to areas they consider to offer better terms.

The workforce in the 21st century is increasingly getting unionized to get a better ground for advocacy on matters affecting them. The response of the human resource managers to this is not going to be like it was in the centuries before where the employees could bulldoze workers and wedge them out of unions. The employers will have to be cognizant of the role that the unions play and pursue other avenues of increasing earnings other than wage-based strategies (SHRM Foundation, n.d). Lastly, consumers are increasingly getting conscious about the human resource practices of various employers in terms of their respect for employment rules and human rights. Companies today ask for human resource practice compliance reports before they can sign deals. This means that employers such as Walmart will have to have compliance per excellence to remain competitive in this era.

In the face of the dynamic human resource management practices, it is essential that the managers embrace practices relating to retention of employees in the workplace, equal opportunity for all, and maintaining a robust performance management. It is essential that workers are treated equally right from the time of recruitment, selection, deployment, all the way to the point of engagement breakup. This way, the employer will win the motivation of the worker which is essential for the achievement of human capital management objectives. Employees’ retention should be the second center of focus for Walmart (Fortune 500 , 2015).

Employees’ productivity increases with years of experience because the employee gets more and more dearly to the operational requirements of the organization with time. When the engagement breakup frequency between the employer and the employees is high, the employer incurs additional costs such as hiring, firing (compensations), losing out core personnel, and training of new workers (SHRM Foundation, n.d). The employer should pursue policies that aim at the retention the available workforce such as paying efficiency wages.

The human resource management should also focus on strengthening the employee-employer relationship through performance management. This can be achieved through establishing and maintaining an effective and well-constructed performance management by way of getting employee feedback. Employees’ expectations should be understood and the employers should provide the employees with tools that are required in order to achieve the best of performance. High standards of job descriptions, continuous feedback monitoring, and a regular schedule of performance standards measurements should always be kept by the employer (Fortune 500 , 2015).

References Fortune 500 . (2015). Fortune. Retrieved from http://fortune.com/fortune500/. SHRM Foundation. (n.d). Retrieved from http://www.shrm.org/foundation. Walmart Inc. (2016). Investor Relations. Retrieved from: http://www.walmart.com/.