Motivation is a force that initiates and directs people in persisting in their efforts in order to achieve their goals. Walmart, one of the largest retail companies in the world, has been quite successful in getting its employees to feel motivated. It has fostered motivation among its workforce using extrinsic and intrinsic rewards (Caillier, 2014). This essay argues that the performance of employees at Walmart, USA is something that has been considerably enhanced by the sense of motivation instilled in them by the company’s administration through its rewards and incentives system. The essay concludes that motivation plays a vital role in getting employees to perform well at the workplace, and that similar companies should take the cue from Walmart and focus on motivating its employees well enough to get them to do their best for the company and generate high revenue growth.
Walmart is a renowned multinational retail corporation that is headquartered in Arkansas, USA and which operates an entire chain of discount department stores, grocery stores and hypermarkets across the globe. The company came into existence in the year 1962, and was established by a man by the name of Sam Walton. Today, Walmart owns approximately 12,000 clubs and stores in as many as 28 countries and operates under at least 59 different names. It is the largest revenue generating company in the world and is also the world’s largest private employer, being serviced by 2.3 employees globally (Logan, 2014). Additionally, Walmart is the single largest grocery retailer in the USA, earning several billion dollars from its operations in the country (Ton, 2014).
In the last couple of years, Walmart made some heavy investments by giving the workers at its US stores, bonuses and raises. It did so in the hope of motivating its employees sufficiently enough to improve the long and lagging customer scores. For instance, Walmart is believed to have spent as much as 2.7 billion dollars simply on raising the initial or starting salaries of thousands of its employees across the USA (Caraway, 2016). It also provides its employees with a number of health care and financial benefits, so that they feel secure and protected by the company and work to potential during service hours. All of Walmart USA’s associations and their immediate family members benefit from health care insurance schemes at exceedingly low prices, schemes that not only entail pharmacy bills, but also primary doctor visits and dental appointments. As far as financial benefits are concerned, Walmart employees are given the scope of purchasing Walmart goods and services at lower or discounted prices. At times, employees are even given incentives like additional income, depending of course on how well the company performs (Lazaroiu, 2015). Walmart has also focused on motivating its employees by giving them challenging tasks instead of easy ones. Competition is something that is greatly encouraged among Walmart associates and every effort is made on the part of the Walmart USA administration to keep the company’s employees on their toes at all times, working as hard as possible. A term known as cross-pollinated has also been advocated by Walmart whereby all the managers of its different departments get to swipe jobs with one another, with the sole purpose of this being to remain challenged when working for the company. In doing so, the Walmart employees feel well respected as they are given the impression that they have the ability to accomplish challenging tasks while doing a good job of this at the same time (Dobre, 2013).
The initiative taken by Walmart USA to reward its employees well enough so that they feel motivated to perform as best as they can at work is an initiative that appears to be reaping good returns for the company. In the opinion of Walmart executives, the customer scores for Walmart’s products in the USA are fast, friendly and clean and have been rising steadily over a period of seventy nine weeks. This is quite an improvement given how low this retail company would rank in comparison to its peers, in numerous customer surveys (Lee & Raschke, 2016). The internal studies at Walmart measure satisfaction levels for hundreds and thousands of customers every single month and take a look at factors such as store cleanliness, check-out speed, helpfulness of store workers and whether or not store items are always in stock. Important things like paying attention to details, greeting customers in a friendly manner on the sales floor enabling them to understand promotional offers on the Walmart app are key and something Walmart has been able to carry off only with the help of a hugely motivated staff (Eisenberger et al., 2016). Walmart is aware of how competitive the retail industry in the USA is and knows that customers can deflect quite easily to rival companies like Dollar General, Aldi and Target, if they are disappointed by the products that are sold at Walmart. It therefore intends on keeping its employees as motivated as possible to perform efficiently and effectively at the work front and has even taken upon itself to sufficiently train its associates in sales and operations, with the training programs usually lasting for a period of two weeks (Koca-Helvaci, 2015).
That motivation is necessary to ensure the adequate performance of employees at a work place is not an argument that is easily disputed. Counter arguments on how motivation could fail to generate good employee performance are next to none. It is widely accepted that all companies and organizations around the world need to motivate their employees sufficiently by introducing rewards, incentives and other performance based accolades to give them every reason to do as well as they can when they report to work every single day (Shahzadi et al., 2014). It is important and necessary for employees to feel valued and wanted at the place where they carry out their service, if their potential is to be realized at an individual and general level. They should not be intimidated or made to feel unworthy or discouraged as this can hamper their performance considerably and make them want to leave the company that has hired them rather than feel motivated enough to work for the company for as long as possible (Shields et al., 2015). It is difficult to argue that motivation has little or no role to play where employee performance is concerned therefore. All companies and organizations need to undertake efforts to keep their employees motivated well enough, so that they can be serviced by a positive and highly determined workforce. Such a workforce will be willing to put in several hours of work in the day in order to take the company’s business goals forward.
Thus, it is clear from the case of Walmart USA’s rewards and incentives program for employees, that if employees are adequately compensated and rewarded on the work front they will feel motivated enough to perform well for the company. This is turn will lead to higher revenue generation for the company, enabling it to take its business to great heights. Motivation is therefore imperative for enhancing employee performance at the workplace. It is only when employees feel the desire to do their maximum for the company that has employed them can they actually be made to do valuable work. Without motivation, employees at any company or organization will end up operating like robots and their dissatisfaction or indifference to the work that they do, will soon get highlighted in the quality of the service they render as well as in the manner in which customers perceive or respond to the goods and services for the company.
References
Caillier, J. G. (2014). Toward a better understanding of the relationship between transformational leadership, public service motivation, mission valence, and employee performance: A preliminary study. Public Personnel Management, 43(2), 218-239.
Caraway, B. (2016). OUR Walmart: a case study of connective action. Information, Communication & Society, 19(7), 907-920
Dobre, O. I. (2013). Employee motivation and organizational performance. Review of Applied Socio-Economic Research, 5(1).
Eisenberger, R., Malone, G. P., & Presson, W. D. (2016). Optimizing perceived organizational support to enhance employee engagement. Society for Human Resource Management and Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 2-22.
Koca-Helvaci, Z. C. (2015). Walmart and its employee relations: organizational stance-taking and legitimacy. On the Horizon, 23(4), 374-386.
Lazaroiu, G. (2015). Employee motivation and job performance. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations, 14, 97.
Lee, M. T., & Raschke, R. L. (2016). Understanding employee motivation and organizational performance: Arguments for a set-theoretic approach. Journal of Innovation & Knowledge, 1(3), 162-169
Logan, J. (2014, January). The mounting guerilla war against the reign of Walmart. In New Labor Forum (Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 22-29). Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.
Shahzadi, I., Javed, A., Pirzada, S. S., Nasreen, S., & Khanam, F. (2014). Impact of employee motivation on employee performance. European Journal of Business and Management, 6(23), 159-166.
Shields, J., Brown, M., Kaine, S., Dolle-Samuel, C., North-Samardzic, A., McLean, P., … & Plimmer, G. (2015). Managing employee performance & reward: Concepts, practices, strategies. Cambridge University Press.
Ton, Z. (2014). The good jobs strategy: How the smartest companies invest in employees to lower costs and boost profits. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
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