29 min
Walmart's Maren Waggoner on Scaling Voice of the Employee Get Reworked
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- Management
How can a company communicate with employees who are distributed across multiple locations, roles and time zones? More importantly, how can companies ensure these communications are two-way and not a top down broadcast?
In this episode of Get Reworked, Maren Waggoner, VP of People, End-to-End Operations, U.S. at Walmart gives us an inside look at how the company communicates with — and hears from — the 1.2 million associates working in U.S. operations.
"Part of listening isn't just what might not be working, we definitely want to have an eye to that and an ear to it. But also, we want to have an ear to what are the great ideas that our associates are seeing every day in their day-to-day work. And we have an application, or a kind of a channel, that we've established called me@ideas at Walmart. And so any associate at any time can go into this channel and submit an idea of maybe something we should consider doing or a better way of doing things," said Maren.
Highlights of the conversation include:
What the company means by tech-enabled, people-led. How employee listening scales from the local to the corporate level. How Walmart uses tools like natural language processing to establish employee sentiment. Plus, host Siobhan Fagan talks with Maren about creating feedback loops for employee suggestions, how the company balances technology and in-person channels for communications and where she plans to focus her efforts in the year ahead. Listen in for more.
Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Send it to editors@reworked.co.
Please note: The conversation was recorded before the mass shooting at a Walmart store in Chesapeake, Va. in November, so the events of that day do not come up in the discussion.
How can a company communicate with employees who are distributed across multiple locations, roles and time zones? More importantly, how can companies ensure these communications are two-way and not a top down broadcast?
In this episode of Get Reworked, Maren Waggoner, VP of People, End-to-End Operations, U.S. at Walmart gives us an inside look at how the company communicates with — and hears from — the 1.2 million associates working in U.S. operations.
"Part of listening isn't just what might not be working, we definitely want to have an eye to that and an ear to it. But also, we want to have an ear to what are the great ideas that our associates are seeing every day in their day-to-day work. And we have an application, or a kind of a channel, that we've established called me@ideas at Walmart. And so any associate at any time can go into this channel and submit an idea of maybe something we should consider doing or a better way of doing things," said Maren.
Highlights of the conversation include:
What the company means by tech-enabled, people-led. How employee listening scales from the local to the corporate level. How Walmart uses tools like natural language processing to establish employee sentiment. Plus, host Siobhan Fagan talks with Maren about creating feedback loops for employee suggestions, how the company balances technology and in-person channels for communications and where she plans to focus her efforts in the year ahead. Listen in for more.
Have a suggestion, comment or topic for a future episode? Send it to editors@reworked.co.
Please note: The conversation was recorded before the mass shooting at a Walmart store in Chesapeake, Va. in November, so the events of that day do not come up in the discussion.
29 min