When Doug McMillon took over as CEO of Walmart in 2014, he decided to make some changes.
The 33-year company veteran had a mandate to revive stagnant sales and battle some formidable e-commerce competitors. But he also set out to change the company’s narrative, and focusing on his relationship with workers was a big part of that, my colleague Phil Wahba writes in a new magazine article.
Since 2015, the company has increased starting wages from $9 to $14 an hour and created more learning pathways to facilitate internal mobility among workers. It has also introduced new benefits such as covering employees’ college tuition. Those improvements have been instrumental in motivating workers, keeping them in the fold, and improving the high turnover rate that plagues the customer service industry as a whole.
McMillon has also courted goodwill in other ways, supporting efforts to reduce Walmart’s carbon footprint by delivering on its promise to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions six years ahead of schedule.
“We are not a perfect company, but we have done a lot of good things for the environment, for our associates and for each other,” he says. “I would love for the reputation to match the reality.”
The change in reputation that has already occurred is likely a factor that has made it possible for the company to close its regional offices and relocate or attract corporate workers to its company headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, a city of about 55,000 people. That includes engineers, marketers, marketers and all kinds of retail executives who could live in places like New York City or Los Angeles, but have chosen to live in the Ozarks.
“Walmart would not have been able to carry out this modernization, and by extension the ability to better compete against Amazon, without having employees on board,” Wahba says.
Emma Burleigh
emma.burleigh@fortune.com
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Citigroup will now give its staff up to 24 weeks of paid parental leave, to remain competitive with other banks that are expanding their benefits to attract and retain top talent. Bloomberg
Google laid off at least 100 sales and engineering workers, and Microsoft will cut “hundreds” of staff from its Cloud department, as technology companies channel their budgets and efforts toward AI. Quartz
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Forced retirement. A 25-year-old chief of staff at one of the largest AI startups predicts that her job, and most others, will become obsolete in the next three years due to the acquisition of new technology. —Orianna Rosa Royle
Swept. Airbnb’s CEO says he was wrong when he wrote in a layoff memo that he had a “deep feeling of love” for the 1,900 employees who were laid off, saying he was pressured and rushed to write the response. —Chloé Berger
Winner takes all. S&P 500 CEO compensation rose nearly 13% last year, while salaries for private sector employees rose just 4.1% over the same period, as the pay gap continues to widen. —Mae Anderson, Paul Harloff, Barbara Ortutay, KeynoteUSA
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