Walmart Is Talking About Economic Stability and Workforce Mobility. Here’s Why.
We do better, indeed we are at our best, when we are learning from people who come from different political, educational and socio-economic backgrounds. It’s important to hear from supporters and critics, to identify areas for improvement and growth, and the organizations that take diverse perspectives to heart are often the ones that survive and thrive during times of rapid change.
The Aspen Institute has become an important collaborator for Walmart. Together we’ve been building a relationship of candor and working to find common cause where we can. On Thursday, I had the chance to spend a few hours at Aspen’s 2017 Inequality & Opportunity Summit, learning and talking about one of the most important issues of our time — ensuring that people at all rungs of the economic ladder have the ability to find steady work that opens up pathways for growth and opportunity in America.
When I joined Walmart 16 months ago it was, in part, because I came to believe Walmart was serious about change, primarily changing itself so that ultimately it could play a constructive role in useful, broader change. Inside the company there is a sense of humility and urgency to develop new insights and capabilities as we become a different kind of company — one that’s more innovative and collaborative.
We believe that our reach and scale allow us to play an impactful role in developing and putting solutions into action. We do, after all, employ 1.4 million associates in the US, and many more around the world. One hundred forty million Americans shop with us each week in stores or online, and 83% of Americans shopped with us last year. Our e-commerce business is the second largest in the country, and growing fast.
Today, retail is the place where many people get their first job. It’s a place where people are able to earn while they learn, begin to lay the foundation for their careers and set the stage for advancement.
The experience of Walmart associates certainly bears this out:
· 75% of Walmart managers began as hourly associates; one of them ended up becoming our current CEO
· On average, a Walmart store manager makes $170,000 a year — and well they should: It’s a complex job, leading what is often a $100-million-dollar annual business and managing nearly 300 associates
So we believe retail has a unique opportunity to help people as they get started in today’s fast-paced economy. If that’s right, then what role should Walmart play? Where can and should we lead?
We’ve already taken a handful of key actions.
Two years ago, we invested $2.7 billion in our associates, including raising our starting wage and giving raises to more than 1.2 million associates. More important than the pay increases, though, we invested significantly in training and we adjusted our approach to key workforce issues, addressing head-on challenges related to the stability and mobility of our associates.
The team at the Aspen Institute understands better than anyone the increasingly complex headwinds facing today’s American families, and we’re deeply interested in what they have to say. The U.S. Financial Diaries, for example, have been passed around Walmart — read by our HR, benefits and policy leaders alike. They’ve helped us better understand that one of the most significant contributions our company can make related to the challenges of opportunity and inequality is to foster increased stability for our frontline associates where their time and finances are concerned.
Steady, predictable work schedules are a foundational piece of creating workplace stability. This has been and will remain a challenge for Walmart, but we’re working on it.
Our associates now get their schedules more than two weeks in advance, and we’re rolling out a new scheduling program in our Neighborhood Markets that provides associates more stability and transparency in their schedules. And we are increasing the practice of associates being given fixed schedules, enabling them to work the same hours on the same days for up to six months at a time. These are modest steps, perhaps, but meaningful when taken together — and implemented at Walmart scale.
Another example of how we’re trying to meet associate needs relates to income volatility, a key challenge for hourly workers across a number of sectors. To better understand the issue and to begin to help address it, Walmart recently conducted an “income smoothing” pilot in Florida to provide associates more visibility into, and consistency in, their monthly cash flows. The predictability of a steady cash flow enabled associates to plan for expenses, save money and budget day-to-day. Almost 2,000 associates chose to enroll in the pilot, and their feedback was overwhelmingly positive. Based on the insights we gained from this test, we’re planning to extend the pilot to other areas of the country later this year.
The stability created by predictable scheduling and income smoothing is one critical part of the puzzle — but there are others, including training and opportunities for advancement.
And so, one year ago Walmart started opening Training Academies adjacent to a number of our Supercenter locations. This initiative is expected to become the largest-ever training effort by a private sector company. Walmart Academies teach advanced retail and leadership skills to assistant managers, department managers and frontline hourly supervisors. To date, we’ve opened more than 80 Training Academies and by the end of 2017, we will graduate more than 225,000 associates.
Alongside the Academies we launched our Pathways program through which we teach entry-level associates retail fundamentals and the soft skills needed to foster confidence and success in any workplace. Entry-level associates can complete the Pathways program in as little as 90 days, and their achievements lead to a pay raise. This precedent should echo throughout the retail industry.
But here’s the key: the program not only leads to higher pay, it opens the door to advancement and opportunity by adding hard and soft skills that are transferable beyond Walmart and beyond retail.
If you ever have a chance to visit one of our Academies or attend a graduation ceremony, you’ll get a true sense of the meaningful role an employer can play as a catalyst for career and economic mobility — at scale — and actually improving people’s lives.
We’ve taken these steps in part because we’re spending time with teams like Aspen. They and others are helping us get smarter and better focused. We want to continue to develop these new muscles. If we can continue to develop ways of working together effectively, with the array of expertise represented by folks of diverse economic, political and educational backgrounds, we can meaningfully improve the readiness of more people to be successful in the workforce well beyond Walmart and the retail industry.
Any such improved capability to work together will not come a moment too soon. We have enormous economic, societal and public policy challenges ahead — actually, already upon us — as our economy begins to experience the automation revolution and all that comes with it.
So our view, our hope, is that together we can build common capacity to solve the issues confronting us today. The American workforce deserves it.
