How The World's Largest Employer Is Evolving For The Future Of Work

Jacqui Canney, is EVP and Chief People Officer at Walmart and Clay Johnson, is EVP and Chief Information Officer at Walmart.

Jacqui has been with Walmart for three and a half years. She is focused on the development, the retention and the rewarding of their 2 million employees. Clay joined Walmart 18 months ago. He focuses on the technology but also the shared services for the company. He is charged with putting those two together to create more productivity and automation.

With over 2 million employees, Walmart is the world’s largest employer. They have 5000 stores in the U.S and 10,000 globally.

Skilling and training employees on a massive scale

Investing in people is a focus for Walmart, in particular the last few years they have made investments around salaries, training and education. As Jacqui puts it, “we are people led and tech enabled. So investing in our people and humanity is what Walmart is rooted in and is our competitive advantage”.

Recently, they have been moving wages and announced new education benefits that employees have been asking for. One of them is a dollar a day college opportunity. Both full-time and part-time employees who have been with the company for at least 90 days are able to attend college for $1 a day to get an associate degree or a bachelor’s degree.

They have also created in-house training called academies and have about 200 of them in the United States, as well as others outside of the United States where they are teaching employees retail fundamentals and leadership skills.

New jobs or skills that Jacqui and Clay are identifying as being important at Walmart include:

1. Digital literacy,
2. Data-driven decision making,
3. Growth mindset,
4. Flexibility and adaptability and then the
5. Empathy

One of the things recently implemented at Walmart is called BYOD at work. It stands for bring your own device.  So they can bring their personal phones into work and also have access to any kind of the work content they would have on a desktop. So, if an employee is on the floor, they can access all types of training content, just like they were sitting at a desk.  The idea is to create more productivity and allow people to learn in a lot of different ways.

They also recently announced a game that it’s on the App store called Spark City - that anybody can actually play. It’s the gamifying of how to run a store. So, people that want to work at Walmart can use it, even before they are hired.

You may not realize how technologically advanced Walmart is when it comes to their workforce. They are leveraging a lot of cutting edge tools to train, retain, and upskill their employees. Here are just a few examples:

• Using IOT – Including having sensors in freezers that ‘go bad’ and allowing employees to connect with their personal devices throughout the store
• Applied blockchain to food safety – to be able to identify the original source of the food the supply
• Jet Black – Which allows anyone to find and order gifts tailored to the recipient

Jacqui and Clay say that Walmart is running, not walking, into the next 5-10 years and they are excited to see what new tools, tech, and resources become available to allow them to stay ahead.

What you will learn in the episode:

• How Walmart is evolving and using cutting edge tech to train and upskill their workforce
• How they are using Blockchain to track food
• What the future of Walmart looks like 5-10 years out
• Trends Jacqui and Clay are paying attention to
• What is store #8 and how is Walmart using it to test new trends