Thread regarding Walmart layoffs

I worked at GE during the Jack Welch era. The forced ranking system can be effective if executed across the enternprise. A lot of the GE Industrial businesses are located in “Rust Belt” locations that are not necessarily the hot destination cities such as Erie, Cleveland, Cincinnati, and Milwaukee.

If executives place their cronies in roles and they don’t perform, then executives will be shown the door. It requires strong leadership. Jack Welch replaced a majority of the business leaders when he because CEO at GE as he determined that they were not aligned with his vision for the company. Eventually, the business will be a hostile environment for low performers who just want to hang out and not deliver as accountability and performance will more important than tenure and relationships. Performance will show up in sales, operating profit, cash flow, and returns on invested capital.

I agree that there is a lot of enertia and tradition to overcome in the enterprise. It won’t be easy, however, with the ongoing restructuring, a lot of people know that times are changing.

I totally agree with the last 3 posts.

@2vnl, yeah they are using the Jack Welch, GE model now, no doubt. It won't work though at HO because of 2 things.

1. This is a backwoods, rural place. There aren't other companies to recruit from. Smart people won't come here and risk getting stuck with no place to go when Walmart dumps them.

2. There is too much nepotism in the Director/Sr. Director and some higher ranks who are fixed on mediocrity and keeping the status quo so they can keep themselves and their underperforming buddies employed.

It might work at Amazon, but Seattle is loaded with top talent to choose from. Also, lots of highly educated recent grads coming in from great schools. Seattle is a fantastic place for a recent grad, it's a great city! Bentonville, ha ha ha, no kid in his right mind would want to live in Bentonville. Bentonville s---s. Too, Amazon doesn't reward mediocrity. They do not have a culture of nepotism from what I've seen.

@2vnl I think you mean Jack "Welch", the former CEO of GE who pioneered "rank and yank". Not trying to be a spelling Nazi, just clarifying in case someone unfamiliar wanted to learn more.

I believe you'll find the so called "rank and yank" provides an eventual positive return for a 2 to 4 year period. It keeps employees scared and in line. You need to read Jack Walsh's book. It's the Walmart Leadership Playbook now and will be for the next couple of years. What they're doing at Walmart is textbook Jack Walsh.

@rje No ranking will cause the best people to leave because they can easily find a better job. Employees that stick around in bad work environment don’t have options generally.

@1rje So when everything is automated and there is only 10 people per store and people have no jobs who is going to buy anything at WM? No one will be able to afford anything but the basic necessities IF that. Hell, just replace everyone with cybernetic squirrels. No labor costs whatsoever.

Everyone should recognize that labor is the highest expense cost of any business. The rank and yank works in a positive way to thin out the numbers. Forced ranking will cause many to leave voluntarily.

They are not hiring in Bentonville and they are trying to clear out ISD. They don’t want technical support in Bentonville, we know those jobs are going to India.

I would proffer a guess that they don't intend to hire people to come to Bentonville. Most of the upper level tech management positions are on the coasts. I think all they really want to have in Bentonville is support. It's a lot cheaper to do support here and you don't need technical expertise.

Rank and yank at WMT will be an unmitigated disaster. It works at places like AMZN because they pay significantly higher than market and they're in a large city where there's plenty of talent to churn through. AMZN is known as a brutal place to work and that's coming from top 10% types and even they only tolerate it because of the money.

WMT will not overpay for talent and not many people are going to uproot their family to move to Arkansas for a job that may get eliminated within 12 months even if WMT offers above market money.

The reason why rank yank and HG works at amazon is they pay their employees above market salaries and 20000 -30000 bonus. Good health insurance too. Walmart salaries are below market, terrible benefits, ghost work from quarterly layoffs on top of already impossible workload and smaller bonus. So why do they think we put up with rank yank? To live in arkansas?

I like the part about the Hunger Games survivor becoming the manager. It’s probably just as valid as how they pick the leadership now.

As for rank and yank, even GE moved away from this. Amazon does it, but the word is out in the industry about them and their turnover is extreme. Everyone I talk to says Amazon is a place they wouldn’t want to work. And these aren’t lazy stupid people saying this.

Walmart already has trouble recruiting to Bentonville. You couple rolling layoffs with rank and yank and we are going to have a talent pipeline problem.

Getting rid of 10% of the workforce via rank and yank is a horrible idea. Get rid of the people who ate not doing the job. This might be 50% or 0% for a particular area. If the team can't win together, but members are focused on making the other team members perform lower or have to fend off others stealing their work, true team performance suffers. Under rank and yank, morale suffers and the companies reputation as a place to work suffers. There is plenty of research to back this up.

You are spot on about this.

To @Raj2lqz-eba

Good point. Offer the buyouts to associates 55+, in certain areas, or some other criteria. Surely there’s a better solution than seemingly random reductions.

@1zsv - I like the Hunger Games idea. But, we should add a twist. Each department should offer up 20% of their associates who duke it out until there's only one left. The one left becomes the manager.

Lol yeah let’s literally fight for our positions with Wal-Mart

I instead of the quarterly layoffs that they’ve been doing, they should begin hosting the Walmart Hunger games.

Random drawing and if you get picked as tribute you fight for your life in a Hunger Games style arena. It’s more humane than what they’ve been doing deciding your life behind closed doors. Those par rank meetings are just a big popularity contest anyhow.

This firing ad re-hiring is crazy to me,what makes the employee better.I believe after 25 yrs,or more you should be give a servant package, and bring in younger people with brighter ideas for the advancement of the company.And after a 2yr.cotract or what it may be,and its not to par they should be stepped down.The company needs more,more people managers and not in a group.

Except that people who have in demand skills and are high performers might take a voluntary RIF just to get the money then they'd find another job elsewhere. Bottom line, high performing individuals who have great skills don't have a lot of trouble securing work. Walmart under that scenario would get stuck with people who, for a number of reasons, cannot get employment elsewhere.

Walmart really needs to be getting rid of the lowest performing 10% on a constant basis. They haven't been good at weeding people out who need to go, which is a morale killer for high performing teams.