Improving absenteeism and exceeding break time limits at Walmart - Research Paper Example

em and area for improvement (b) impact of the organization’s culture, (c) client and practitioner’s considerations, (d) diagnostic process and data collection, (e) overcoming resistance to change, (f) action plans, strategies, and techniques, and (g) OD intervention analysis. Ultimately, absenteeism leads to labor turnover. Every year, Wal-Mart needs to recruit, hire, train and retain more than 790,000 employees to refill a gap created by the left employees; it is estimated, in 2005, Wal-Mart employed 1.

8 million employees globally and the turnover rate was 44 percent (Boudreau, 2010, p.125). Some conservatives estimates highlight that the turnover rate has reached to the level of 50 percent in the recent years clearly indicating that the Wal-Mart employees have developed sense that they are under-paid, offered inadequate health benefits and insecure career growth and so on (Jackson et al., 2012, p.15).This state of affair indicates that the existing causes and trends in absenteeism need to be revisited and overhauled.

Before going to revisit the existing human resource policy of Wal-Mart, it is reasonable to further understand the impacts of the existing policy. In 2004, Costco hired and employed 68,000 workers and 25% of them were unionized, while Wal-Mart’s Sam’s Club employed a total of 102,000 in the same year (Holmes and Zellner, 2004). In the same article, the authors mentioned that in terms of wages alone, a Costco employee generated and earned, on average, $33,218 ($ 15.97 hourly). On the other hand, the average Sam’s Club employee earned $23, 962 ($11.

52 per hour). Hypothetically speaking, if a Costco employee voluntarily quits, the turnover cost would be around $ 49,827 (1.5 times annual salary); and Sam’s Club employee would cost $ 35, 943. At the face of it, it may appear as if the low-wage strategy at Sam’s Club generates higher savings in terms of turnover but actually it is not the case (Cascio, 2006, p.42). Cascio (2006) further