Photo by Marques Thomas on Unsplash
Walmart is cutting hundreds of corporate jobs and asking its remote workers to return to offices.
Changes in "some parts of our business … will result in a reduction of several hundred campus roles," the company's chief people officer Donna Morris said Tuesday in a memo to employees shared with USA TODAY.
Also, employees who currently work in Walmart's smaller offices in Atlanta, Dallas and Toronto are being asked to relocate to the company's bigger hubs, she said. "Most relocations will be to our Home Office in Bentonville, but some will be to our offices in the San Francisco Bay Area or Hoboken/New York," Morris said in the memo.
Walmart will still allow staff to work remotely part-time, but will be expected to be in offices the majority of the time, according to The Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg reported, which first reported the moves late Monday.
"We believe that being together, in person, makes us better and helps us to collaborate, innovate and move even faster," Morris said. "We also believe it helps strengthen our culture as well as grow and develop our associates."
While the number of jobs cut "are small in percentage, we are focused on supporting each of our associates affected by these changes," Morris said in the memo. "We have had discussions with associates who were directly impacted by these decisions. We will work closely with them in the coming days and months to navigate the best path forward."
Walmart has about 1.6 million U.S. employees and, like many other companies, has been pushing employees to return to the office, Business Insider reported.
These actions come just days after Walmart, which entered the primary care business in 2019, said it planned to shut down its virtual health care service and close all 51 of its Walmart Health centers, because it was “not a sustainable business model.”
The timing of the corporate layoffs after the announced closing of health clinics suggest they may be "part of a restructuring that would allow Walmart to allocate additional resources to more profitable revenue streams, like advertising and fulfillment," Blake Droesch, senior analyst covering retail and ecommerce at research firm eMarketer, told USA TODAY.
Read full article here