Role of HR in Strategic Initiatives of Walmart

Role of HR in Strategic Initiatives of Walmart

Introduction

Walmart, an American retail MNC, is the biggest employer in the world with almost 2 million employees. It runs discount departmental store chains and warehouses stores. With such a large number of human assets, the founder of Walmart focused highly on company's HR department. The top management also places great importance on Walmart's strategies alignment with the HR practices (Nile & Jeffrey, 2004). The management believes that company's goals can only be achieved if the business strategies are aimed using the HR practices. Thus, Walmart's HR department works to accomplish seven overriding strategies (Cost, Procedures, Culture, Key Item / Items, Expenses, Talent, and repair) by taking HR initiatives. The following section discusses the initiatives taken by HR to realize business goals (Bergdahl, March, 2012).

Discussion

At Walmart, the HR strategy is integrated with corporate strategy. This is done by engaging management at three levels (Dessler, 2005). The three levels are corporate-level, business-level and functional level. All three strategies aim to maintain the low cost leadership. The employment policies are also built on grounds of low cost leadership. This helps in maintaining low employment costs (Bergdahl, March, 2012). The results from these initiatives are clear from the data of 2002. In that period, the operating costs of the company were approximately 16% of the sales. On the other hand, the average costs of the retail industry at the same time period were 20%. This is mainly because the labor costs are cut by two-tenths of a percentage point each year (Dessler, 2005). Thus, the aggressive HR policies are the fittest for the company's goals.

From the recruitment perspective, the HR aims to safeguard the company by providing cost advantages (Bergdahl, March, 2012). The company employees are encouraged to work with low ...