Home Depot

Home Depot's Culture Change

Home Depot's Culture Change

Introduction

The purpose of this study is to expand the boundaries of our knowledge by exploring some relevant facts and figures relating to our topic i.e. cultural change at Home Depot. In this paper, we will write a 'story of change' at Home Depot, identify the images of managing change at Home Depot. We will also examine the environmental changes that drove the change at Home Depot, also explain the reasons for the resistance of employees (Pettigrew, 2005, pp. 57-33). Home Depot is currently the largest retailer in the world in the field of home renovation. The industry is highly competitive. The head office of the company is located in Atlanta, Georgia. For about 20 years, the company has been eminent domain, with an average annual growth of 35%. However, in the late 90s, sales growth slowed and the company began to experience financial and operational problems (Charan, 2006, pp. 2-11).

Discussion & Analysis

Story of Change

Robert Nardelli was a leading star at General Electric (GE). He was the head of the division of large hydraulic systems for the electricity industry. The Board of Directors of Home Depot considered himself lucky to be able to get hold of such a leader. To attract Nardelli, the Council has offered a real pot of gold consists of generous pension benefits, performance bonus guarantees, a cash payment of $ 20 million in the event of termination, and other "benefits various” (Newman, 2000, pp. 18-22). Formed in the culture of a highly structured management at GE, he worked regular weeks of six days and 80 hours. Of course, he expected his colleagues to do the same direction. Nardelli has the mandate to build a more centralized culture as uniformity and standardization was lacking in the company. Instructions and decisions thus, came more and more of the head office. Employees must now rely on detailed operational data, not intuition. To this end, in July 2001, he introduced the Six Sigma system, which he had implanted, in GE. Employees must now meet financial and operational targets set across the company on a weekly basis. In order to attain permanent and major change in business performance, the organizations should generate a sustainable change in the culture (Mroczkowski, 2007, pp. 26-37). The Home Depot has implemented the same strategy by identifying key determinants of the organization's culture in order to bring change and achieve new performance objectives. In order to achieve this strategy, they have utilized certain tools that helped the organization to modify its culture. Together with effective utilization of tools, employees were also positively driven towards accelerating the change. Following are some of the tools that were used by Home Depot to bring cultural change (Charan, 2006, pp. 2-11):

Resource Planning and Strategic Operations

Regular Talent Evaluation

Detailed forms of Data

Learning Forums for Store Managers

Conference calls at the start of the week

Task forces of employees

Leadership Development Programs

HR process improvement

The New Strategy

According to Nardelli "A successful strategy lies in its implementation by the ...