Managing Talent

Walmart’s Struggle to Manage Diversity and Safety on a Grand Scale

Walmart drew national attention when it announced their Veterans Welcome Home Commitment. Under that policy, any veteran who has been honorably discharged from the U.S. military and applies to work at Walmart within 12 months of being discharged is guaranteed a job, assuming he or she passes a drug test and background check. The company said it expected to hire more than 100,000 veterans over five years under the program. Walmart U.S. chief executive Bill Smith pointed out that this serves a practical as well as a patriotic purpose: "Veterans have a record of performance under pressure" and of being "quick learners" and "team players."

For Walmart, hiring veterans is just one way it lives out its mission of "Making better possible." That includes helping shoppers save money, but also enabling people to work in a fair and honest environment. The company teaches four beliefs: sercive to customers, respect for the individuals, striving for excellence, and acting with integrity. At its headquarters, respect for others is expressed in a festive environment at an annual Cultural World Fair, where employees representing different ethnic backgrounds share food and the arts with one another. Employees in the corporate offices also can find sympathetic colleagues by joining resource groups such as UNITY, the African American resource group, and Pride, a group for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees and their allies.

These principles, as well as policies such as hiring veerans, have a large impact, because Walmart operates on a massive scale. The company employs 2.2 million people in more than two dozen countries around the world. Principles such as valuing diversity affect more than a million workers in the U.S. alone. In the case of hiring veterans, the 20,000 veterans hired per year is a huge number but only account for about 4% of Walmart's new U.S. employees. The disadvantage is that spreading a value such as equal opportunity is difficult to do in such a large organization, where many personnel decisions are made at the individual-store level.

Evidence for the difficulty comes from the variety of complaints made to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, as well as the resulting lawsuits and settlements. In one recent settlement, Walmart paid more than $360,000 after store managers failed to stop an employee from sexually harassing an intellectually disabled co-worker for several years. In another, the company paid $87,500 after a store refused to hire a brother and sister whose mother previously had charged the company with sex discrimination. The EEOC found that the store's decision was retaliation against the mother. In yet another case, the EEOC sued Wal-Mart Stores of Texas for violating the Age Discrimination in Employment Act for harassing and eventually firing a 54-year old manager who had requested accommodation for his diabetes. And the agency recently sues Wal-Mart Stores East when the management of a Maryland Store refused to authorize a saliva drug test for a job applicant who had end-stage renal disease and therefore could not take a urine test.

These complaints are a contrast from corporate policy and publicity. Walmart notes that more than half of the promotions granted to hourly workers in its stores go to women. At Headquarters, the company recently announced a 40 percent increase in the number of women holding top executive positions. For human resource managers, tha question is how to build on these successes and help spread fair employment practices throughout the entire organization.

Questions

1. In what way is Walmart trying to meet legal requirements for equal employment opportunity?

2. What could Walmart’s HR managers do to help the company improve its performance in complying with EEO laws?