- How do managers attempt to manage and improve individual performance? How are employees selected, rewarded and developed? In your view, are these mechanisms effective in managing and improving the performance of employees?
Walmart inculcates into its employees a simple yet powerful set of beliefs that enhance their effectiveness. The three basic beliefs that shape the organization’s culture, focus, thinking and energy are:
* Respect for the Individual
* Service to Our Customers
* Strive for Excellence (Newsome, 2000, p.20)
These beliefs also provide a “value yardstick” against which actions of employees are judged. It was Sam Walton who conceived of these three principles when he founded the organization. He saw them as the foundation from which the company will make robust policies and decisions. These beliefs are held valid even in the changed context of business today, compared to the early days of the company. (Newsome, 2000, p.20) Walmart’s motto of ‘Service to Our Customers’ includes two kinds of customers–external customers who shop in Wal-Mart stores and internal customers, the associates Wal-Mart works with every day. Wal-Mart translates these beliefs into action, through the following three principles:
* Aggressive Hospitality
* Satisfaction Guaranteed
* Every Day Low Prices (Newsome, 2000, p.20)
While these beliefs are the qualitative means of enhancing employee performance, Walmart employs other standard quantitative HR measures to improve performance as well. These include suitable financial incentives for improving performance, job promotions, offer of stock options, etc.
- In your view, do these mechanisms have adverse effects on employee performance?
These mechanisms have been fairly successful in fetching desired results for the Walmart management. But, while extracting maximum productivity and effectiveness from employees is one thing, catering to their welfare is quite another. Often there is an inverse correlation between employee performance and employee satisfaction. While Walmart has consistently managed to achieve the former, it has largely failed in accomplishing the latter. As noted Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman observes, Walmart is constantly waging a ‘war on wages’. (Reed, 2010. P.4) Hence, mechanisms employed to optimize employee performance tend to have overall adverse effects on the employees. The following passage bears further evidence of adverse effects on employees:
“The extensive public record on cases filed against Wal-Mart, currently the most sued corporation in the United States, reveals disturbing allegations. These include sex discrimination in pay, promotion, and compensation, wage abuse, exclusion of contraceptive coverage in insurance plans, violations of child labor laws and the Americans with Disabilities Act, and discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation…Employees have also filed cases charging management with discouraging workers from unionizing, firing pro-union workers and eliminating jobs once workers joined unions…In addition, Wal-Mart refuses to dispense Preven, the “morning-after pill,” in effect imposing a right-wing political agenda on all of its shoppers.” (Bull, 2002, p5)