Walmart Turns to VR to Pick Middle Managers
June 30 2019 - 5:59AM
Dow Jones News
By Sarah Nassauer and Chip Cutter
When some Walmart Inc. store workers want to apply for a
higher-paying management role, the company fits them with a $250
virtual reality headset to see if they are the right candidate for
the job.
The country's largest private employer is using a VR skills
assessment as part of the selection process to find new middle
managers, watching how workers respond in virtual reality to an
angry shopper, a messy aisle or an underperforming worker.
VR training is becoming more common in a variety of industries
to educate a large number of workers quickly or assess the
technical ability of high-skilled workers like electricians or
pilots. But Walmart's use of the technology to gauge a worker's
strengths, weaknesses and potential is significant because it
pushes VR evaluation out to a massive hourly workforce and in some
cases helps determine who gets raises and who gets demoted.
"What we're trying to do is understand the capacity of the
individual from a leadership perspective and how they view
situations," said Drew Holler, Walmart's senior vice president of
associate experience. Walmart executives hope the technology will
limit bias inherent in many traditional hiring decisions, increase
diversity and reduce turnover among its 1.5 million U.S. employees
in a tight labor market.
The assessment yields a color-coded report for hiring managers
that describes strengths and weaknesses -- perhaps weak leadership
skills, but strong knowledge of the fresh produce department --
that can help determine promotion decisions or the need for
additional training, said Mr. Holler.
Walmart started using virtual reality training broadly last
year, adding headsets in the backrooms of all 4,600 U.S. stores to
train over a million workers how to stock shelves or use new online
pickup machines. In one training meant to encourage empathy,
workers see through the eyes of a cashier, then inhabit the view of
a dad with his son as they hold up the line by carefully counting
change, only to find they don't have enough.
The VR assessments have been given to over 10,000 workers so far
as part of a new store management structure rolling out to some
stores that reduces the number of managers. To earn those
higher-paying jobs, workers take the VR assessment and undergo more
traditional evaluation by management and workers.
Earlier this year, Walmart employee David Arias earned a
promotion to team leader and a 10% pay raise after using the VR
evaluation. "I scored pretty evenly both in ability to train and
the ability to lead," said the 32-year-old, who has worked at
Walmart for 12 years and was previously a training coordinator at a
supercenter in Economy, Pa.
Walmart's use of VR reflects broader efforts by employers to
quickly, but fairly gauge workers' abilities as jobs change due to
automation and other factors, said Stacey Philpot, head of
Deloitte's leadership practice. "It's really important that
companies do a better job of assessing potential," she said.
As Walmart begins to use VR to evaluate workers, it can use the
data to identify how certain traits correlate with performance,
said Jeremy Bailenson, founding director of Stanford University's
Virtual Human Interaction Lab and co-founder of Strivr, a Menlo
Park, Calif.-based company that designed Walmart's virtual reality
training. "We know how high performers act and we can match with
that," he said.
Walmart wanted to understand how candidates respond when they
have to prioritize different work or how they communicate with
co-workers in times of conflict, said Michael Casale, a cognitive
neuroscientist who is Strivr's chief science officer. Walmart
managers completed real-life performance assessments for hundreds
of candidates that took early VR evaluations to verify accuracy and
build the first iteration of the algorithm that scores workers, he
said. For now, scores are based on how workers answer questions in
VR.
But Strivr and Walmart are moving toward integrating a worker's
body movement and attention data, collected in VR, which early
research shows gives a more accurate and complete picture of future
performance and a candidate's soft skills, said Mr. Casale. That
data isn't yet used in scoring, he said.
The use of body movement data to predict personality and
potential could have pitfalls if workers aren't given other ways to
prove their worth, say some training experts. Workers become
high-potential employees for many reasons, including training,
experiences, opportunities and access to mentors -- characteristics
a VR assessment may not be able to fully capture, says Andrew
Gadomski, managing director of recruiting and workforce analytics
firm Aspen Analytics. "No one's got a silver bullet, " he says.
VR is a "touchpoint in our selection process. It's not a
disqualifier," or a mandatory part of the promotion process, said
Beth Nagel, Walmart human resources market manager for the
Pittsburgh area, which is using the tool. So far "VR has
substantiated what we as a manager see in someone as
potential."
Strivr doesn't use VR assessment in its own hiring or promotion
decisions, said Mr. Casale. "I imagine it's something we will
explore in the near future on an experimental basis."
Write to Sarah Nassauer at sarah.nassauer@wsj.com and Chip
Cutter at chip.cutter@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 30, 2019 05:44 ET (09:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
Walmart (NYSE:WMT)
Historical Stock Chart
From Mar 2024 to Apr 2024
Walmart (NYSE:WMT)
Historical Stock Chart
From Apr 2023 to Apr 2024