Wal-Mart can be popular all over the world, and the first push is undoubtedly the promise of "parity every day". This commitment is by no means a slogan, nor is it empty talk, but it is consistently realized through the "three lows" operation mode of low purchase price, low cost and low price increase. First of all, Wal-Mart does not engage in kickbacks, does not need suppliers to provide advertising services, and does not need delivery (these Wal-Mart will take care of themselves), but it must get the lowest purchase price. Secondly, Wal-Mart strictly abides by the low-cost operating standard that office expenses only account for 2% of turnover, and "breaks a penny into two halves", thus "saving more expenses than competitors". The most remarkable thing is Wal-Mart's low-cost business philosophy of "saving every penny for customers", which has made many ordinary consumers who are extremely sensitive to price loyal to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart has small profits but quick turnover, as evidenced by figures: 1970, operating income of $365,438+00,000, and profit of1.20,000; 1980, and its operating income is124.8 billion USD; 1990, its operating income was $25.8 billion and its profit was 10 billion. In 2003, its operating income was $259 billion and its profit was $90.5 billion. Industry experts commented that compared with all transactions, Wal-Mart is indeed operating at a low profit. However, it is this retail enterprise that neither deals in cars and oil that make quick money, nor produces airplanes and cannons that make money. But in less than half a century of ups and downs, it won the invincible hand all over the world and earned a lot of money. In China market, everyday parity has also become its success.
The second road to success: customer first, smiling service.
There are two rules about Wal-Mart's "customer service": First, the customer is always right; Second, if you have any questions about this, please refer to Article 1. "Customer satisfaction" is an important goal of Wal-Mart. Customer satisfaction is a promising investment, which can ensure future success and development. Wal-Mart's promise to provide customers with "quality service" and "unconditional refund" is not a beautiful slogan. This unrelenting integrity and rules ensure that every customer has no worries. How can this not make people have a preference and loyalty to Wal-Mart?
In order to attract customers, Wal-Mart has a very famous "three-meter smile" principle: it requires employees to "greet customers with gentle eyes when they come within three meters of you and ask if they need help." At the same time, there is also a quantitative standard for smiling at customers, that is, "eight teeth" should be revealed when smiling at customers, so they hire employees who are willing to look at customers' eyes and smile. Wal-Mart surveys customers' expectations and reactions every week. Managers collect information according to computer information system, and through direct investigation, customers expect to update product mix in time, organize procurement, improve product display and placement, and create a comfortable shopping environment. Through this move, Wal-Mart has created a very comfortable shopping environment for customers.
The third road to success: be kind to employees and treat employees fairly.
Walton once said: "75% of Wal-Mart's business belongs to manpower, and it is those extraordinary employees who shoulder the mission of caring for customers. It is not only correct but also natural to regard employees as the greatest wealth. " Therefore, in the overall planning of Wal-Mart, the establishment of partnership between enterprises and employees is regarded as the most important part. Wal-Mart implements its "Profit Sharing Plan", "Employee Discount Regulations" and "Scholarship" to every employee, such as paid vacation, holiday allowance, medical care and personal insurance. It can be said that Wal-Mart respects everyone in the company and gives the best to employees through equal treatment, instead of relying on the media to brag. Walmart people all over the world are respected despite their different backgrounds, colors and beliefs. Even Sam himself has no fixed parking space in the parking lot in front of the headquarters office building, which is an equal position; Fortune magazine commented that it "won the loyalty and enthusiasm of employees by spending a lot of money on training and upgrading internal employees, and 60% of managers started from hourly workers". Take Wal-Mart's regular manager meeting as an example. It usually invites those who think and make good suggestions for enterprise management to participate. Even hourly workers can fully express and participate in discussions, which shows that opportunities are equal. At the same time, Wal-Mart encourages employees to be proactive. Although they don't fully value diplomas and academic qualifications, no matter who you are, as long as you have the desire to improve yourself, you will get the opportunity to study or further study, which provides educational equality.
This people-oriented corporate culture concept has greatly stimulated the enthusiasm and creativity of employees. Employees have put forward suggestions to cut costs, designed ingenious product displays and invented flexible and diverse promotion methods. An employee found that Wal-Mart's original door-to-door service can be replaced by Wal-Mart trucks on the same route, saving the company more than $6,543,800 per year.
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Wal-Mart is the largest retail enterprise in the world, so what makes Wal-Mart beat all the industry giants and create such a brilliant miracle in the history of world retail?
The competition in retail industry is, in the final analysis, the competition for talents. The most unique advantage of Wal-Mart is the professionalism and team spirit of its employees. Sam. 6? 1 Wal-Mart and its successors have repeatedly emphasized the importance of people to Wal-Mart, and employees are regarded as the company's greatest wealth.
Wal-Mart's human resources strategy can be summarized in three sentences: retaining talents, developing talents and absorbing talents.
Retain talents
Wal-Mart is committed to providing every employee with a good and harmonious working atmosphere, a perfect salary and welfare plan and a broad career development space, and has formed a unique set of policies and systems in this regard.
1. Partner Policy In the terminology of Wal-Mart, the employees of the company are not called employees, but "partners". The specific policies of this concept are embodied in three complementary plans; Profit sharing plan, employee stock purchase plan and loss incentive plan. 197 1 year, Wal-Mart implemented a profit sharing plan in which all employees participated: every employee who has worked in Wal-Mart for more than two years and worked 1000 hours a year is eligible to share the company's profits for that year. By the end of 1990s, the total amount of profit-sharing plan had been about $654.38+0.8 billion. This plan has made employees' enthusiasm for work unprecedented. After that, Sam launched the employee stock purchase plan, which allowed employees to buy shares at a price lower than 65,438+05% of the market value through salary deduction. In this way, the interests of employees are closely related to the interests of the company, and a real "partnership" has been realized. Wal-Mart has also implemented many bonus plans, the most successful of which is the attrition bonus plan. If a store can control the loss within the target set by the company, every employee in the store can get a bonus of up to 200 dollars. This plan well embodies the principle of partnership, and also greatly reduces the loss rate of the company and saves operating expenses. In Wal-Mart, there is also a good cooperative relationship between managers and employees. The button of the company manager is engraved with the words "We care about employees". Managers must be kind to employees, respect and appreciate them, care about them, listen to their opinions carefully and sincerely help them grow and develop. In short, the partnership is reflected everywhere in Wal-Mart, which unites Wal-Mart into a whole.
2. Open door policy Wal-Mart attaches great importance to the communication of information, and puts forward and implements the open door policy, that is, employees can communicate with managers or even presidents orally or in writing as long as they have ideas or opinions, without fear of retaliation. Any manager who retaliates with the "open door" policy will be severely disciplined or even fired. The implementation of this policy fully guarantees employees' right to participate and lays a solid foundation for the information communication of Wal-Mart's human resource management. Wal-Mart communicates with employees in various forms, from the annual general meeting of shareholders to simple telephone conversations. The company spends hundreds of millions of dollars on computers and satellite communications every year. Wal-Mart is also the first enterprise in the same industry to share information with employees. Giving employees the right to participate and mastering many indicators of the company together with employees is the operating principle of the whole company. Sharing information and responsibilities is also the core of the partnership. Only when employees fully understand the business progress will they have a sense of responsibility and participation. Only when employees realize their importance in the company will they strive to achieve better results.
3. "Public servant" leaders are in the company, and the organizational relationship between leaders and employees is "inverted pyramid". Leaders are at the bottom, employees are the cornerstone in the middle, and customers are always the first. Employees serve customers and leaders serve employees, and they are employees' "public servants". For all employees who take up leadership positions, Wal-Mart first puts forward the following requirements: "If you want to succeed in your career, then you must make your colleagues feel that you are working for them, not for them." The "public servant" does not sit behind a desk and give orders, but implements "walking" management. Managers should come out and communicate directly with employees and deal with related problems in time. In Wal-Mart, the badge worn by any ordinary employee indicates that "our employees create differences" (our colleagues create extraordinary things). The job card does not indicate the position except the name, including the top president. There is no distinction between superiors and subordinates in the company. You can call them by their first names, which helps to create a warm and friendly atmosphere and provide employees with a pleasant working environment. In addition, there is a resignation interview system to ensure that every employee who leaves the company has the opportunity to communicate with the company's management before leaving the company, so as to understand the real reasons for each colleague's resignation, which is conducive to the company to formulate the corresponding human resources strategy. The implementation of the retention policy not only minimizes the employee turnover rate, but also makes employees become Wal-Mart customers even if they leave their jobs.
train men for profession
Wal-Mart operators have realized the importance of talents to the success of enterprises through continuous exploration. Strengthening employee education and training is an important channel to improve the quality of talents. Therefore, Wal-Mart takes strengthening the training and placement of existing employees as its top priority.
1. Establish a lifelong training mechanism. Wal-Mart attaches great importance to the training and education of employees, establishes an effective training mechanism, and invests a lot of money to guarantee it. Every international company must work out and review the annual training plan with the international department of the head office in September every year. Training programs are divided into on-the-job training, promotion training, job transfer training, global best practice exchange training and various special trainings. Each training program includes 30 days, 60 days and 90 days of retrospective training to consolidate the training results. Training is divided into different levels, including on-the-job technical training, such as how to use mechanical equipment and how to allocate materials; Have professional knowledge training, such as foreign language training and computer training; Have corporate culture training and instill Wal-Mart's business philosophy in an all-round way. More importantly, Wal-Mart trains managers in leadership and management skills according to the potential of different employees, who will become the backbone of Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart attaches great importance to improving the business ability of branch managers and has a unique approach. Wal-Mart's top management doesn't directly instruct them how to do business, but lets store managers learn this lesson from the market and other stores. For example, Wal-Mart's advanced intelligence information system provides branch managers with detailed information about customer behavior. In addition, Wal-Mart also invested in buying special planes and regularly airlifted store managers to the company headquarters to attend seminars on market trends and commodity procurement. Later, a satellite communication system was installed, and the headquarters often held conference calls, so branch managers could exchange market information with each other without leaving the store.
2. Pay attention to learning and responsibility. Mr. Sam, the founder of Wal-Mart, respects the hard work and friendliness of small-town Americans. Therefore, the emphasis on employing people is ability and teamwork spirit, and education and diploma are not very important. In general retail companies, people who have no more than 10 years of work experience will not be considered for promotion to manager at all. In Wal-Mart, after half a year's training, if they perform well, have the ability to manage employees and are good at selling goods, the company will give them a chance to try their hand, first as assistant managers or help open new stores, and then if they perform well, they will have the opportunity to manage a branch independently.
3. Internal promotion system In the past, Wal-Mart pursued the concept of "recruitment, retention and development", but now it has changed to the model of "retention, development and recruitment". Coleman, Senior Vice President of Human Resources Department of Wal-Mart? 6? 1 Peterson said: "This change is not only a semantic change, but also shows the importance of retaining and developing the talents that the company already has, which is no longer the feature of the company's previous continuous recruitment." The company expects to give full play to the potential of employees, create opportunities to enrich and expand their work content, and try to promote from within to encourage and practice managers. For each employee's performance, the Human Resources Department will regularly make a written evaluation, interview the employees and store them in personal files. It is understood that Wal-Mart's evaluation of employees is divided into probation evaluation, anniversary evaluation and promotion evaluation. The evaluation content includes this colleague's work attitude, enthusiasm, initiative, work efficiency, professional knowledge, strengths and areas that need improvement. These will serve as an important basis for employees to be promoted in the future. Finding talents in time, actively creating an environment and maximizing the potential of talents are Wal-Mart's talent concept and the reason for its success today.
Absorb talents
In addition to selecting existing talents from within the company, Wal-Mart began to introduce senior talents from outside to replenish fresh blood, so as to enrich the company's human reserve. When recruiting employees, Wal-Mart provides equal employment opportunities for every candidate, regardless of race, age, gender, region and religious belief. From 1998, Wal-Mart began to implement the internship management plan, that is, colleges and universities held vocational lectures, which attracted a large number of outstanding fresh graduates. After a long period of training, I have enriched myself to various positions, greatly alleviating the demand for talents for the rapid expansion of the company's business.
David, President and CEO of Wal-Mart? 6? 1 glass said, "Our employees created Wal-Mart's value system." Wal-Mart's brilliant development history and prospects are indeed worthy of our China retail industry's deep thinking and reference. Employees are the main body of the company, respect employees, establish partnership with employees, maximize the creative potential of employees, let each employee fully realize his personal value, and strive for perfection in all work. Only in this way can enterprises truly stand on a higher starting point and realize leap-forward development.