How Walmarts Donna Morris Manages the Largest Work Force in America
More than 30 years into a career that had brought her to California and then Arkansas from her native Canada, Donna Morris could not have chosen a more challenging time to take on the role of chief people officer of Walmart.It was February 2020 — a couple of weeks before the coronavirus pandemic upended the world and laid bare an uncertain future for both workers and the retail industry.Walmart perhaps had more reasons than anyone to worry about what the future would bring — the retailer is the largest private employer in the United States, with 1.6 million employees, representing a work force largely the size of Philadelphia.“The first thing on our mind was, how do we secure the health and well-being of all of our associates?” Ms.
Morris said recently, reflecting on that time.“How do we safeguard the well-being of our associates? And then I will also say: How do we safeguard the well-being of any customer or member that’s coming in?”Walmart has a sprawling employee base that stretches across 4,600 Walmart stores, 600 Sam’s Club locations and soon a 350-acre campus being built in Bentonville, Ark., where the company has its headquarters.
Its work force includes hourly workers without college degrees who restock store shelves, engineers who previously worked at Silicon Valley tech firms and longtime employees on the corporate track.Longevity at the company is something of a badge of honor — literally.
Workers in Bentonville walk around the company’s offices with name tags stating how many years they have been an employee at Walmart.Thus, Ms.Morris arrived as something of an anomaly among the executive ranks: an outside hire.
Roughly 75 percent of the managers at Walmart started as hourly associates.After 17 years at the software provider Adobe, where Ms.
Morris rose the ranks within its human resources department to eventually run it, an executive search firm reached out to her in early 2019 to see if she’d be interested in joining Walmart....