Talent Management Strategy

Talent Management Strategy at Publix Super Market Inc.

Introduction

Publix Supermarket is a supermarket chain operating in United States that sells food and beverages, kitchen clothing, pharmaceutical products and other services and programs for its shoppers. Publix Supermarket employs 200 personnel with a clear-cut management hierarchy consist of 20 managers in the leadership positions. The talent management strategy of the Publix Supermarket is focused on having highly motivated employees as top-most priority of owing to the fact that without high motivation, not only that the Publix Supermarket has to bear high administrative cost (high turnover which will result in more training cost, personnel will tend to steal inventory whenever they will be off to the eye of a camera in order to make up for their 'loss' which they are suffering through due to low salary or less benefits as compared to the employees of other supermarket chains, etc.) but employee's productivity will also be a big issue as de-motivated employees just 'work to get by' rather than 'work to excel'. Consequently, the service quality of Publix Supermarket will suffer and will surely result in unhappy and disloyal customers. Publix Supermarket see motivated employees as its core competency and in order to keep and develop this core competency, Publix Supermarket employs a talent management strategy that not only rewards and recognizes the deserving and motivated employees formally and informally by offer them a competitive benefits package and competitive salary, but also provide them with a sense of family when they are on job by providing them a friendly and enabling environment without 'evil and strict' leadership which is normally found in other superstore chains with high employee turnover (Pollitt, 2010).

In the last decade, the retail industry in America has gone through a phenomenal growth in terms of sales and profits and seen a rapid development in terms of related diversification, such as Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Metro, Lotus, China Resources, Lianhua, Hualian, Wumart chain of Chinese and foreign enterprises have expanded into retail grocery business and in spite of the fierce competition in this particular area. This phenomenon has given Publix Supermarket tough time in multiple ways. Firstly, Publix Supermarket is now seeing an unprecedented competition due to the entrance of “Retail Giants” into the market. Secondly, this rapid development of retail grocery has resulted in an extreme shortage of professionals and high employee turnover on the part of smaller supermarket chains like Publix Supermarket as employees are leaving the jobs to find better opportunity in international grocery retailers such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. For numerous local supermarket chains, the talent has become a "bottleneck" restrict in their business development process. Supermarket chains like Publix Supermarket are facing a deficit in personnel supply and demand situation. In the current situation, owing to the shortage of high-quality talent, opening 5 new supermarkets is easy, but to find one 10 quality manager to run those supermarkets profitably is highly difficult. Keeping in mind this situation, in the next section, we have proposed and formulated a ...