Reducing labor costs and hiring the best talent are key elements of Kroger’s workforce planning policy (Kroger, 2014). The planers also forecast talent gaps to enable the company to understand its future labor requirements. Kroger’s workforce planers focus on determining the talent gaps in the company by performing job requirement analysis in collaboration with line managers to identify the existing skill shortages and redundancies. Additionally, Kroger links workforce planning objectives to employee development needs, recruiting/ staffing processes, and contingent labor requirements. The company aligns its workforce planning initiatives to its overall business strategy to improve its performance. Learn More Current Workforce Planning ApproachĬurrently, Kroger uses a strategic approach to workforce planning. Generally, innovation enables Kroger to improve the quality of its products and services beyond customers’ expectations. The core roles required by the company to achieve the desired innovation include technology innovators and customer service experts.įor instance, in 2013 the company’s technology innovators developed a real-time temperature monitoring system that enables the company to provide the freshest food products in its stores. Investing in advanced technologies and innovation is central to the company’s strategy of creating competitive advantages by prioritizing customer needs. As a result, Kroger is able to sell its merchandise at low prices without compromising its financial results. Second, Kroger achieves economies of scale as its customers increase due to excellent service quality. First, it enables the company to improve its brand loyalty by retaining its customers. The rationale of prioritizing customer needs is twofold. The feedback enables the company to provide excellent services to customers, stock the right products, set affordable prices, and create a memorable shopping experience (Kroger, 2014). This strategy involves listening to customers and using their feedback to enhance the company’s operations. Kroger prioritizes customers’ needs in order to achieve its profit and market share objectives. This helps in increasing sales, which in turn improves the company’s profits. Kroger focuses on reducing its operating costs in order to sell its merchandise at a low price. However, Kroger’s prices are often not as low as those of major retailers such as Wal-Mart. Kroger’s business strategy is to maintain cost leadership while generating good financial returns. This structure enhances decision-making processes by giving authority to the heads of the operating divisions to make merchandising decisions. Kroger uses a decentralized organizational structure that consists of its headquarters and 20 operating divisions. The use of different store formats helps the company to retain its customers by enhancing their shopping experience. The supermarkets have different formats, which include combination stores, price impact stores, and multi-department stores (Kroger, 2014). Kroger operates supermarkets, convenience stores, and jewelry stores. Specifically, the workforce consists of old and young employees who are from different cultures, ethnic, and racial backgrounds. Diversity is an important characteristic of the company’s labor force. Majority of the employees are members of international labor unions. Kroger’s workforce consists of nearly 375,000 full-time and part-time employees (Kroger, 2014). In addition, they demonstrate respect by appreciating other people’s values, cultures, and beliefs. Kroger’s employees believe in being truthful to customers and suppliers to ensure high standards of integrity. The company’s core values include honesty, integrity, respect, diversity, safety, and inclusion (Kroger, 2014). This mission enables the company to establish long-term relationships with its suppliers and customers in order to achieve its vision. The company’s mission is “to be a leader in the distribution and merchandising of food, pharmacy, health/ personal care items, seasonal merchandise, and related products” (Kroger, 2014). In order to achieve this vision, the company has focused on expanding its operations by joining new markets and aligning its products to customers’ needs. Kroger’s vision is to be the preferred provider of high quality grocery and personal care products in the world. The company sells a variety of food products in 2,640 stores worldwide (Kroger, 2014). Kroger is one of the largest grocery retailers in the US. The last part will shed light on the workforce planning approach used by the Kroger Company. The second part will highlight the company’s business strategies that enable it to achieve its objectives.
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