Walmart aims to upgrade its workforce
Regional HR chief will be looking to upgrade skills of 30,000 workers
The Houston regional director for human relations at Walmart tells how the retail giant is investing more in its workers both to improve their quality of life and store performance.
Walmart has intensified its focus on its employees in recent years in a broad effort to improve store performance and better respond to new retail demands. In 2015, it announced it would invest $2.7 billion in raising wages and opening hundreds of “Walmart Academies” to teach employees skills to advance themselves within the company. Trina Grier, regional human resources director for Walmart, is in charge of that initiative in Houston. She joined the company in 2009 as a regional compliance manager and transitioned to human resources in 2011. She worked in North Carolina and Indiana before arriving in Houston in January. She now oversees more than 30,000 employees in the region and recently sat down with the Houston Chronicle to discuss her role at the company.
Q: What are your responsibilities in your role here? A: I am responsible for ensuring that our people are a priority. As a
company, we have a focus on talent development, and as a region, our focus is on developing our talent when (employees) walk through the door. It’s really about that end-to-end training for efficiencies and intentional delivery of customer service.
Q: During your time with Walmart, what sort of changes have you seen in the company’s focus on its employees?
A: That’s the total focus. It’s about the knowledge base of the associate and ensuring that the associate has access to every tool necessary, or access to the resource, to make the right decision for customer service and their own growth. Work/life balance is an important component. The company is really driven to improve the quality of life, if you will, of the associate.
Q: How have you seen that commitment play out among the employees you work with here?
A: I can give you an example. In this area, we are doing regional selection. It’s for our assistant manager trainees to have an opportunity to come into a corporate, competitive interview process. We were able to promote 27 assistant store managers on the spot. These folks were all hourly associates who were able to put their best selves forward. One of the stories we heard during that process, from some of the associates in the room, was that their salaries and quality of life could double (with the promotion).
Q: What do you hope to accomplish this year in your new role?
A: I’m really trying to build my presence in Houston. The first piece of that is talent development. My desire is that we continuously promote through that regional selection process. From the ground up, I need to encourage and motivate our associates so that they can change their situations. If you’re a cashier today, six months from now you can be an assistant manager. It just depends on your effort level and your commitment to learning the business and showing that you want to do more.
The second piece is associate engagement. We do fun Fridays. The store managers get involved in contests. In our individual stores, we encourage (managers) to reach the associates and spend some time getting to know them. We require what we call CBWA — coaching by walking around.
The last thing, for me, is diversity and inclusion. What greater place to do that than the melting pot called Houston? If we think about the talent development and associate engagement, there’s always an opportunity to focus on something that touches an inclusive factor.
Q: How does this market compare to others you’ve worked in?
A: North Carolina is home for me, and being a native, I don’t even know if I saw the diversity that was present because it was what I grew up with. But then I left North Carolina and went to Indiana. Once I left the city of Indianapolis, I saw that diversity was not as much of a focus. That became one of the things that (influenced) my commitment to diversity and inclusion. The melting pot of Houston has cultures that I would have never interacted with in Indiana.
It’s also competitive. I don’t think there’s a block that I’ve driven down that didn’t have everything you needed, and that just drives the hunger to bring more attention to Walmart because we have competition on every corner. To keep our associates engaged, we’ve got to do something a little bit different (such as) providing those opportunities to advance. I like to talk about a lot of the store managers I’ve met during the course of my career who started out as cart pushers. By the time you calculate bonuses and everything, they could make a quartermillion dollars a year.