Total Rewards Program
Introduction & Purpose

With greater understanding of how key business objectives like employee attraction, retention and motivation contribute to overall business outcomes, human resources departments have been challenged with expanding their scope, and looking at the total rewards experiences of their companies’ employees. When the links between business strategy, people strategy and total rewards are mapped out, it becomes apparent that getting the right workers into the right jobs requires a comprehensive total rewards strategy (Kaplan, 2007). This paper will set out a total rewards program for Walmart, focused on the front line workers who work in the retail stores and make up the majority of the companies 2 million workforce. The distinction here has to be made between the front line retail workers and workers in other parts of the business, who might have more specialized skillsets and for whom the total rewards program might look quite different.

Overview of the Organization

Walmart is the world’s largest company by revenue, its largest retailer and its largest employer. While Walmart has employees who perform just about every job – famously having their own meteorologist – most of the company’s employees are the associates, or front line retail workers. Walmart’s business strategy is to be a low cost provider of household goods, including groceries, and because of this the company needs to control costs in all aspects of the business. Any change to the compensation package for the associates will be rolled out over some 1.5 million people at least, and as a result the company pays close attention to the total rewards package for these workers. In recent years, as the unemployment rate in the United States has dropped to just over 3%, finding and retaining good quality workers has become a challenge, and this has forced Walmart to rethink its total rewards strategy, including finding means to attract different categories of workers. An example of this is the move it made a few years ago to offer tuition benefits as a means of attracting high school aged workers, who not only can work hard, but also want flexible hours, and will stay with the company over the course of their education if they are receiving the tuition benefit and free SAT prep (Meyersoh, 2019).

The total rewards program at Walmart therefore needs to maintain a low cost structure per employee, allow the company to attract a fairly high caliber of worker who can execute efficiently, while still delivering a reasonable customer service level, and helping the company overcome a fairly poor reputation as an employer. A comprehensive total rewards program is highly likely to help meet all of these different criteria.

Segmentation of the Workforce

Walmart’s employs range for senior executives – who are tasked with running the world’s largest company by revenue – to a wide range of specialized professionals, to the associates who form the low-wage core of the company’s workforce. Associates are often part-time, work the flexible hours demanded of retail roles, and perform relatively low-skilled jobs, but do need to perform their tasks well because of the company’s need for a highly efficient workforce. The needs of this workforce may still include things like provision for learning opportunities and a high quality work environment,...…in-store leadership is stronger, and works with the company to create a better working environment for the associates. By removing some of the frustrations that can occur with poor frontline management, Walmart can create a superior work environment and that alone can attract better workers, and help to retain them longer, than might otherwise be the case.

Metrics should be things like turnover rates, length that positions remain open, and the total cost per employee, which will show both the costs and the outcomes of the program, enabling Walmart to calculate its return on investment in this area.

Risks

Not implementing a better total rewards program will put Walmart at a competitive disadvantage. The company is competing for labor in a tight market and needs to cultivate every advantage it can – if it doesn’t have the people to keep its stores running, it will struggle to be profitable. Furthermore, it might end up spending more money increasing wages to achieve the same effect that total rewards can achieve.

Conclusions

Total rewards programs have the benefit of making the company more attractive than companies that offer similar wages, and at a lower total cost to the company. Walmart can improve its total rewards program by focusing on the working environment and development opportunities, and by leveraging its bargaining power to offer superior benefits, such as with health care, or employee discounts. By doing this, it can reposition itself as an employer of choice for anybody in the market for a low wage job, or one that is flexible, part-time or otherwise suited to workers for whom more traditional employment is not viable.…