It’s a good time to be a store manager at Walmart, if the company’s latest annual Environmental, Social & Governance Report is any indication. The report, which covers the retailer’s activities for the fiscal year that ended Jan. 31, highlights various facets of the business, including their wages and workforce. One major highlight: Store managers on average earn a salary of $175,000, a number that far outweighs the national average for their counterparts at other companies.
Walmart said that they are investing in their associates and team members through improved wages along with better educational opportunities, benefits and training. “Since the first U.S. Walmart Academy opened in 2016, more than 800,000 associates have gone through training,” the company stated. “And we expanded our parental-leave and adoption policies and raised starting wages again. As of last year, a full-time hourly associate in the U.S. who gives birth to a child is eligible for up to 16 weeks of paid time away.”
For store managers who have risen up the ladder, the path to promotion has become a much more feasible reality, especially since the retailer promoted more than 215,000 people to jobs of greater responsibility and higher pay last year. In fact, more than 75% of its store operation management team members started as hourly employees.
In addition to high salaries and job benefits, the company made an effort to implement diversity and inclusion policies throughout the whole business. “We drive and track performance against our social and environmental priorities through our everyday business activities,” the company said. “For example, we track performance toward our diversity goals through our human resources activities and toward our aspirational renewable energy goals through real estate and operations activities. ESG initiatives are embedded throughout our company in our business planning and performance management cycle, operating policies, organization roles and coordinating mechanisms, project governance, and systems and tools.”
Other diversity and inclusion statistics include: 55% of the total U.S. workforce is female; 43% of U.S. management is female; 44% of the total U.S. workforce are people of color; 33% of U.S. management are people of color; and 34% of associates with revenue-producing responsibility are people of color.
In fact, a lot of the store managers moved up in the company through the Walmart Academy, an internal program that offers “hands-on, immersive learning, combining technology, classroom training and ongoing coaching on the sales floor.” The program prepares associates for management-leaning jobs, including department managers and assistant managers.
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