Let me give you a couple things to ponder about Walmart:

-1% of Americans work at a Walmart

-$.36 = amount of profit per $10 spent at Walmart

-600,000 +/- (Number of new employees hired by Walmart annually)

-$15,000,000,000 (Yes that’s Billion) in operating profit.

-$10,000 (the amount of salary increase if Walmart spent every cent they made in profit and divided it equally amongst all of its employees)

So, What does this all mean?   It means that working in HR at Walmart might be the single toughest job in HR in the entire world.

Most Americans would believe that Walmart employees, the normal rank and file – store level employees, are underpaid – on average a full time associate probably makes about $20,000 per year.  Not to great of a living wage.  So, let’s play G*d/CEO and now you’re in charge.  We are going to give you all $15B in profit and let you go out and pay everyone more.  Do you really think going from $20K to $30K is going to change lives – pull someone out of poverty, move them into the suburbs?  No – it won’t.  By the way – Walmart isn’t a non-profit – so thanks for the raise, but the Board just fired you, because you don’t know how to run a company!

I not here to praise Walmart as the savior of our society – they do plenty wrong – like most big businesses who are trying to make shareholders happy.  I’m here to try and get some HR Pros to take another look and have some respect for some peers (of which I really don’t know any Walmart HR Pros – I just believe it’s on tough job!) who are making it happen each and every day, on a scale not one of us can imagine!  Let’s face it, working in HR shops at Zappos, Apple, Google, etc. aren’t really that tough. Yeah, I said it. Sure it was tough work getting on top, and it’s work each day staying on top – but trying being on the bottom for a while – try working for a corporation that is so tight on profit margins that you only have 3 cents of every dollar you bring in to do anything extra for employees – and when you decide to do something extra – multiply that figure by 1.5M!  “Hey, we want to give away a Thanksgiving Turkey to all of our employees”, equals a $25.5M grocery bill!   Makes your $4K budget for a holiday party look pretty good doesn’t it!

I love listening to the great HR Pros from the “Best Companies To Work For” – so much excitement and passion for their organizations. But, what I really like to hear – is how HR Shops in the not so great companies to work for pull it off, especially those of giant companies.   It really stops being HR as 99% of us know it.  It becomes an entire operation onto itself.  Walmart can make a benefit change, a design change, a selection assessment change – and entire industries are moved because of it.  We (the collective HR lot of us) decide we want to increase copays by $5 per office visit and it doesn’t even register as a change.

Love’em or Hate’em HR at Walmart is something that fascinates me.  We all get to listen to best practices of our peers and steal the best ideas and make them our own.  Walmart HR has no peers – everything they do is industry best practice, because no one is in their league from an employment standpoint in private industry.  When’s the last time they won an award in HR?

The Following is a Guest Post by Erin Palmer (also check out her bio below) – she contacted me and wanted to write a guest post, I said she could if she could make me laugh, she did – it took McDreamy to do it – here it is…

I was a nerdy kid by default. I had to wear gigantic red glasses when I was a child. Glasses that my tiny nose could barely hold up. Glasses that magnified my eyes to thrice their normal size. The point is, I didn’t stand a chance of becoming cool until I got my first pair of contacts in seventh grade.

What do my childhood scars have to do with buying Twitter followers, you ask? It’s pretty simple. When my birthday rolled around every year and my mom gave me cupcakes to bring to the class, suddenly everyone was my friend. The cupcakes bought me an entire classroom full of buddies, but as soon as the tasty treats were gone, so were my new pals.

Buying Twitter followers is like a real life version of the eighties classic “Can’t Buy Me Love.” In this film, a pre-McDreamy Patrick Dempsey pays a cheerleader to pretend to be his girlfriend in order to get popular. It works at first, but then it backfires (the way that only a gloriously cheesy eighties movie can). Poor Patrick Dempsey lost his real friends and his fake friends because his plan shattered his credibility. Purchasing Twitter followers cheapens your brand and can cause your actual followers to lose trust in you.

Twitter is about communication, so why pay for a following that won’t lead to genuine interaction?   Patrick Dempsey’s character was better off with his handful of loyal geek friends than the huge group of fickle popular kids that turned on him right away. Having thousands of followers that aren’t reading your Tweets is like putting up a billboard and covering the ad with a giant sheet. If no one sees it, it isn’t promoting anything.

Also, many of the sites that sell Twitter followers make you follow back. Nothing sullies a brand’s reputation faster than a bunch of followers hawking discount medications and “free” cruises. If you want your brand to reap the benefits of Twitter, then you have to do the work the old-fashioned way.    Tweet regularly and make it interesting and relevant. Reach out to people and companies that will find your brand meaningful. Reference eighties movies as often as possible (ok, so this might not work for everyone, but it will make me follow you).

Patrick Dempsey’s character makes a moving speech in the cafeteria when he realizes that what really makes a person cool is to be yourself. Tweet from the heart, not the wallet. You and your brand are special just the way you are.

This guest post was written by Erin Palmer. Help Erin prove that reaching out is the best way to gain followers by following her on Twitter @Erin_E_Palmer.  When she’s not watching bad eighties movies, Erin works with Villanova University’s online programs. University Alliance and Villanova University can help you earn your HR degree or HR certification. For further information about these programs, please visit http://www.villanovau.com.

I will by flying on 9/11 this year, I don’t seem overly concerned by this, just as I’m sure people in Hawaii aren’t concerned about going down to the naval shipyards on December 7th.  Dates and history have a funny way to making us do weird things – like not flying a specific day because a number of years ago an unthinkable tragedy happened on that day, so we now know that it’s a possibility it could happen again.  So, we schedule are flights for 9/12 thinking somehow it’s safer.  It probably isn’t.

I read an article this week that put the tragedy of 9/11 into perspective for me ten years later.  The writer is a local Michigan writer, and he relates the 9/11 tragedies with tragedies that many people face at certain times in their life.  In Michigan this past spring we had a young man die on the basketball court after hitting a game winning shot, when his heart stopped.  It made national news for many weeks, was covered on ESPN as his team went on to play in the state playoffs without their star players and friend.  It was heart wrenching (see the Wes Leonard story here).   From the CNN article by LZ Granderson:

“I didn’t tell him I loved him or hugged him or anything,” Charles said. “Now I won’t ever get that chance again.”

Sadly I hear some element of that phrase over and over again from mourners reflecting on words left unsaid, gestures not made. And even though we all understand in our heads that tomorrow is not guaranteed, it is so hard to live a life that illustrates that understanding in our hearts.

Over the next several days, our nation will spend a significant amount of time looking back at the morning of September 11, 2001, and how much that event changed us.

We will analyze the war on terror and relive accounts of that day from first responders.

Celebrities will talk about where they were when the towers were struck, experts will look at what we need to do to shore up our security and pundits will pontificate on whether the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have really made us safer.

Undoubtedly, there will be moments in which it will feel like overkill, and I’m sure some of it will be. But I believe these are important stories to cover, important questions of morality to ask.

However in the midst of this 9/11 media avalanche, we should be careful not to overlook the most important lesson from the attack, and that is not to take life for granted. You never know which day is your last.

Hug your children.

Hold your spouse’s hand.

Call your mother.

Like most people I’m fascinated by all the stories of heroism during 9/11 and I love watching them on TV, and it still today makes me sick to my stomach to watch in horror the planes hitting the towers and the towers coming down.  10 years later it still seems unreal this happened in America.  I agree with Mr. Granderson’s take in that many people face tragedy each and every day, and for those who never got a chance to say goodbye, when it seemed like just another day when you left in the morning – what we miss, what we really want back, is that opportunity – the opportunity to tell that person how we feel, to hug them, to tell them we love them.  When that is taken away – it’s a personal tragedy for all of us, because you live with that regret forever.

Don’t miss your opportunity today to tell those you love how you feel, take that extra moment to give your wife and kid a hug on the way to work, and stop by and give your HR Manager a hug – G*d knows they need it!

For those who aren’t big Major League Baseball (MLB) fans you probably don’t know what the “September Call-Up” or “Expanded Rosters” mean.  Each year on September 1st, as the MLB season goes into its final month, the league allows teams to invite players from their minor league teams and the roster number expands from 25 to 40.  For teams who are out of the playoff race, this allows them to give some younger guys an opportunity to perform on a larger stage.  For those in playoff races, or teams that have already solidified a playoff berth, the extra players allow them to rest some regulars.  For playoff teams these extra 15 players can’t play in actual playoff games, only in the final regular season games.

Ok, Tim – why the hell should we care about Major League Baseball’s September Call-ups?

In any HR shop I’ve ever worked in, or with any HR Pro I’ve ever had a conversation with – Succession Planning is always an issue HR Pros struggle with in their organizations.  Many times sports shows us there is a way that it can be done, you just need to find a way to tailor it to your environment, and I think the MLB gives us a window to how a competitive organization attempts to get this done.

Succession is difficult and costly, there is no way around it.  If your organization is truly trying to do succession and not spend money – it won’t be pretty and it probably won’t be effective.  To really know a person has the ability to step into someones shoes when they leave, you have to see them actually do the job.  In most organizations this just isn’t an option – how many of us have the ability to pull out a high performer from their current position, and put them into a new position, while the other person is still in that position?  Not many of us!  It’s just not a reality most of live in.

Baseball’s September call-ups is one strategy that you might be able to use within your organization.  While pulling someone full-time into a new position, might not be something you could do – could you do it for 30 days?  Before telling me you can’t – what would you do it that same person had a medical issue and had to be hospitalized or home-bound for a month?  You’d make it, you’d get by – that’s what we do in organizations.  The team would rally and make it work. So, giving someone a 1 month succession stint into a new potential role – full immersion – would actually give  you some decent insight to whether or not the person could actually handle that role in the future, or at least show you some great development needs that have to ensure success.

Is it perfect? No – but that’s why it works.  We don’t get perfect in HR – we get good enough and move onto the next fire.  We don’t get million dollar budgets to formalize succession and have a bench full of high performing talent to just step in when someone leaves our organization.  It’s our job to figure out succession, while we figure out how to keep the lights on at the same time.  I love the September Call-Up – gives me insight to the future of my team, shows me how someone performs in an environment that doesn’t pigeonhole them forever, and let’s me know if they show some potential for The Show!