Walmart Employee Manual
Walmart, the world’s biggest company by revenue, employs one in 10 US retail workers, and one out of every 100 US private-sector employees. That’s a lot of human beings—and a lot of pairs of khakis.
Walmart Policies and Guidelines. Any officer or employee of a foreign government, a public international organization, a member of a political party, a candidate. Employee Handbook This employee handbook is a compilation of company policies, procedures and behavioral expectations that is provided by a company to its employees. Walmart Employee Handbook 2014 - Free PDF Download.
Until recently, all of Walmart’s 1.5 million store employees in the US were required a blue or white collared shirt, black or khaki pants, and close-toed shoes. (Following employee backlash in 2015, Walmart loosened this code, permitting khaki-colored denim for all employees, T-shirts for those who work in the garden department, and jeans for those who do physical labor in the back of the store.)
As of April 14, the drab dress code became slightly more hip. Per an updated employee manual obtained by Bloomberg News, employees in some of Walmart’s 4,700 stores are now allowed to wear shirts of any solid color, and blue jeans or “jeggings” (no matter where they work in the store). According to Bloomberg, Walmart is testing the new dress codes in a small number of US stores in the hopes that more relaxed standards will help attract and retain staff in a tightening labor market.
While the nation’s biggest private employer has long-been vilified for its labor policies, employee satisfaction and retention have been top priorities for Doug McMillon since he became CEO in 2014. In 2015, Walmart pledged to give raises to more than 1 million of its workers. Despite a backlash on Wall Street, the company pressed ahead with its pay plan, boosted Walmart’s starting hourly wage to $11 this February, and distributing bonuses of up to $1,000 to a large percentage of US employees.
Small as Walmart’s dress-code reforms may seem, the impact of clothing choice on employee morale shouldn’t be overlooked. Beyond pure aesthetics (even suburban dads really shouldn’t embrace khakis) restrictive workplace dress codes are inherently paternalistic, and often expensive.
General Motors CEO Mary Barra, when she was running HR for the automaker, saw the connection between dress codes and employees’ sense of empowerment, and edited down GM’s dress code to a simple, two-word appeal: “Dress appropriately.”
Walmart probably won’t go as far as that. While the retailer is relaxing the rules in some cases, the updated manual also includes some new restrictions—facial tattoos, for example, are now banned for any employee hired after April 14—and leather, prints, distressed materials, patches, white stitching, bedazzled clothing, yoga pants, sandals, and Crocs all remain prohibited.
Created by a workers' rights group, WorkIt attempts to make it easier for Walmart employees to be able to access work-related information when not on the job.
Linkin park one more light. Image: Mike Mozart / Flickr
It's not easy for Walmart employees to get information about company policies. The giant retailer does not provide its workers with employee handbooks or copies of personnel policies, and even if it did, its policies are constantly changing. While a small amount of policy information is available to associates who log onto the WalmartOne app and website, most employee policies are only available in an intranet, known as 'the wire,' inside the company. Workers needing information on Walmart's policies have to access the wire when they're logged in at work, on a computer that's typically located in or near a manager's office—a situation that can be less than ideal. For example, a Walmart worker being sexually harassed may complain to her manager, but if the manager isn't addressing the issue, going into his office to use the intranet to figure out what to do next can be a little bit awkward.
The worker group Organization United for Respect at Walmart (OUR Walmart) has taken a stab at liberating this internal information through an app of its own called WorkIt. 'We've been doing this work for a number of years and have really seen the tremendous economic insecurity and instability that people in low-wage jobs, and people working at Walmart are facing every day, and the fact that people are increasingly going to social media to look for and find help and support around the daily challenges they're facing at work,' said Andrea Dehlendorf, co-director of OUR Walmart. 'Levels of mobile adoption are incredibly high, so we decided to build our own platform to build a service that we see people needing, which is peer support around workplace challenges,' she said.
The app lets users ask questions on company policies or their legal rights. It uses IBM Watson AI technology and peer experts, comprised of current or former Walmart employees who volunteer their time to look up answers and train the AI bot.
The app also has a news area, a community-wide chat about issues users want to discuss with each other, and an area that operates more like a message board where users can discuss and organize around topics.
WorkIt is meant to be a less confusing way of accessing information than, say, Facebook and Reddit. 'We realized that the conversations are chaotic, they're disorganized, and it's very difficult to get the right answer,' said Dehlendorf. While Walmart workers can and do post questions on Facebook to try to figure out their rights when they're, say, at the hospital and are worried about getting fired for taking sick leave, they might get ten different and sometimes contradictory answers, which can be very confusing.
'The reason that this is a particular challenge at Walmart is that they really systematically keep information about people's rights and benefits and the policies that govern the workplace inaccessible to people,' said Dehlendorf.
In fact, Walmart appears to be attempting to keep workers from downloading the WorkIt app. An internal memo obtained by Motherboard included a script in which employees were warned about WorkIt collecting their location and personal contact information, and Wal-Mart spokesman Kory Lundberg echoed the sentiment in an emailed statement published in the Wall Street Journal. (OUR Walmart's privacy statement is available on its website.)
'This is a very busy time of year for our associates and they are receiving a lot of information from a lot of different sources. While they are focused on delivering a great holiday experience for our customers, we want to make sure they know this app is not affiliated with Walmart,' Walmart spokesman Blake Jackson said in an emailed statement. 'Our associated already have anytime-access online to the company's most current and accurate Paid Time Off policies. There is no way to know if the details this group is pushing are correct.'
According to permission details for each app as posted on the Google Play Store, the WalmartOne app requires the exact same permissions as the WorkIt app, though the Walmart-branded app is also capable of accessing identity and contacts to find accounts on the device, something the WorkIt app doesn't do.
Employee Manual Pdf
In addition to logistical difficulty accessing the Wire, many Walmart workers find looking up information on the intranet overwhelmingly complicated. The WorkIt app is meant to be more accessible, and if Watson can't answer a question, it'll delegate it to one of the volunteer peer experts. 'This isn't just about access to policy, this is about access to policy, legal rights, advice, and community, and that's what WorkIt really does,' says OUR Walmart co-director Dan Schlademan.
The app is currently available on Android, and will soon be released on iOS. OUR Walmart is also working on making the information available via text or other messaging tools so that it's accessible to workers who don't have smartphones.
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