BUS651 Report: Analyzing Wesfarmers' Work Business in Australia

This report analyzes Wesfarmers, a major Australian conglomerate, focusing on its work-related management practices. It explores how the company applies concepts of motivation, learning, and diversity to manage its workforce, strategies, and processes. The report delves into Wesfarmers' strategies for motivating employees, including valuing employees, providing opportunities for learning and development, and recognizing achievements. It examines the application of motivational theories like Hertzberg's Two-Factor Theory, the Hawthorne Effect, Attribution theory, and Vroom's Expectancy Theory within Wesfarmers' context. The analysis identifies major issues, such as the need for more participative decision-making, and provides recommendations for improvement. The report concludes with a summary of the company's efforts to create a positive and productive work environment, emphasizing the importance of employee motivation and development in achieving business objectives. The report also includes an executive summary and table of contents.

Running head: WORK BUSINESS IN WESFARMERS
WORK BUSINESS IN WESFARMERS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

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Executive Summary
The aim of this report is to analyse Wesfarmers, an Australian company, by using the
concepts, theories and frameworks of motivation, learning and diversity and people
management, and identifying the major issues or problems faced by the company and to solve
by using the relevant application of the theories. Recommendations are also provided at the
end of this report.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Background................................................................................................................................3
Major Strategies and Practices...................................................................................................3
Analysis of the Applications......................................................................................................6
Recommendations......................................................................................................................8
Conclusion..................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
In this report, the aim will be to discuss about the work-related management of
Wesfarmers, including strategies, practices, processes and the outcomes and analyzing and
assessing all these relations in relation with the motivation, learning and diversity and people
management.
Background
Wesfarmers Limited is a conglomerate company based in the city of Perth, Australia,
and founded in 1914, as farmers’ cooperative of Western Australia. It has its presence in New
Zealand, Ireland, India and United Kingdom, apart from Australia. They are present in office
supplies, clothing and general commodity, home improvement and outdoor living, industrial
and safety products, chemicals, coal mining and fertilizers. The revenue earning of the
company is approximately AUD 70 billion. Wesfarmers is the largest Australian company in
relation with revenue earning, and largest private employer, with near about 223,000
employees working there and a shareholder base of 490,000 approximately. They provide a
healthy and satisfied working environment for the employees. They motivate enough their
employees to learn fresh things and implement them in their own area and manages the
diversified employees tactfully present globally.
Major Strategies and Practices
Wesfarmers takes the help of a number of blueprints to motivate their employees to
effort hard, such as valuing their employees, offering accolades, providing scopes to learn
and upgrade themselves, and caring the civil causes. In order to realise the strategies, it is
important to realise the meaning of motivation. Motivation is the logic for the action of the
people, eagerness and their goals. Motivation happens from the communication between

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awake and unconscious factors like the passion or force of desire or want or need, reward and
recognition value of the aim, and the beliefs of the individual and of their associates. Most of
the employees require motivation to have a feeling of betterness about their jobs and perform
excellently. A good capacity of the strategies used by Wesfarmers to motivate their
employees are based on making employees feel valued. Wesfarmers believes in the statement
of delivering the value today and tomorrow. Like valuing their shareholders, Wesfarmers
performs many task to motivate their employees to give their best, as motivation the level of
motivation has a direct impact on the productivity of the employees. The motivated
employees feel excited about their jobs and perform their responsibilities to the best of their
capability and thus, increases the production of Wesfarmers. They offer their employees
flexible working hours and a decent and ambitious salary, to bolster the feelings of their
employees of being valued. By using these strategies, Wesfarmers has been able to establish
an organisational culture of acceptance, involvement and variety, which helps to increase the
feelings of valuing the employees.
Research has been done on the employees of Wesfarmers. The aim of the research is to
find the impacts of motivation on the employees on the issue of labour turnover. The aim of the
study was to know about the applications of the models of human resource, and the survey was
done among the present as well as past employees of Wesfarmers, in order to judge the causes
and subsequent consequences of motivation on the employees. Through the research, it was
found that motivational factors related to the motivation of the employees by the help of diversity
as well as basic job satisfactions. There are also hygiene factors which included monetary and
non-monetary privileges given to the employees.
In addition of using these strategies, Wesfarmers uses accolades to encourage their
employees. Employees who work for more than 40 hours per week, and on holidays, get
incentives and other perks which includes health coverage, 40% percent in store discount as well

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as bonuses, time off programs. They also use recognition programs, to recognise outstanding
achievement on service and sales. Wesfarmers also help picnic once in a year for each of their
division and refreshment programs twice for their divisions. Another action plan that Wesfarmers
uses to encourage their employees, is providing their employees the scope to learn both officially
and naturally. Official learning at Wesfarmers includes the training programs for the employees,
coal miners and managers. Apart from these, employees have the opportunity to learn from
natural processes like continuous learning through on-site hands-on training and training
materials provided by the company. Training and health related classes are taken to the miners
and people engaged with chemical and fertilization division as well as industrial and safety
products. In addition to providing scopes to learn, Wesfarmers present themselves as an
organization that values civil causes, to motivate employees. They also motivate the employees
by increasing the variety of skills, identification of tasks, autonomy and feedback. Wesfarmers
are successful to make understand their employees that motivation is the key to improve the
performance. They try their best to solve the queries of the employees and to satisfy their basic
needs, setting the work related goals and restructuring the jobs accordingly to the requirements by
discussing with the senior level management and providing rewards on each and every level of
the performance, in cash or kind.
All the divisions of Wesfarmers provide many job-specific and career improvement
learning and training opportunities that includes improvement of technical skills, providing
customer service, leadership skills, performing team work, and many more. These programs are
available to permanent, temporary employees, whether part-time or part-time. From the group
level, Wesfarmers provides opportunities for personal learning and preparing new skills, to help
each and every employee feel motivated and taste the success. Wesfarmers invests a good amount
of money in personal training for the employees with the help of education, training and scope for
continuous growth. Personal learning has resulted the company to have more satisfies and
flexible employees, a developed corporate environment for modernization and more opportunity

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for organizational cross-functional learning. Mission of every company is to satisfy the customers
according to their needs and wants to achieve the business objectives. This can be achieved if the
employees are modern and very educated, which is possible by paying attention to organizational
learning. Wesfarmers continuously train and develop their employees so that they can achieve the
basic ability needed for gaining the competitive advantage over others. Proper learning helps the
employees to deliver innovative ideas, which helps the growth of the employees as well as the
company. E-learning as well as classroom based training are conducted and surveys are
performed through distributing questionnaires among the employees to know about their
requirements, queries and ideas for further improvements. Wesfarmers, a company that has
diverse employees, enjoys a better understanding of the global marketplace. Diverse companies
help in higher productivity and profit. The human resource department faces a lot of challenges to
meet the diversity goals of the company. Wesfarmers focuses on reflecting their customers, which
means the demand to manage the internal workforce diversity to timely meet the requirements of
externally diversified customers.
Analysis of the Applications
There are many theories applicable to motivation, learning and diversity and people
management. Wesfarmers followed Hertzberg’s Two-Factor Theory of Motivator and
Hygiene factors. The company held a competition within each and every division and stores
twice in a year. The winner from each division are again faced to challenge each other and
the ultimate winner is handed either with a promotion within the division or to some other
division. He or she may also get a chance to relocate to other countries. In another case, many
workers were performing strike in front of the factories and coal mines, due to the non-
payment of salary and not following the company policies. Wesfarmers had no option but to
satisfy them by increasing the wages and other terms and conditions. This theory indicates
that for the happiest and most fruitful workforce, the company need to work on improving

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both motivator and hygiene factors. To motivate the employees of Wesfarmers, the company
guaranteed they feel appreciated and supported when they are appreciated. The company
make sure that the employees accept the way to grow and advance through the company. To
avoid job dissatisfaction, the employees of the company feel that they are conducted rightly
by offering them the best possible working conditions and fair pay, and they also paying
concentration to the team and arrange supportive relationships with them. Wesfarmers also
follow the Hawthorne Effect. This effect suggests that employees will work harder if they
know they’re being observed. If you show your employees that you think about them and
their working conditions, it may also encourage them to work harder. Wesfarmers encourages
the entire group of workers and employees to give feedbacks and suggestions about the
workspace and improvement. The company also follows the Attribution theory. It is
concerned about the way a learner explains the concept of successes and failures. Wesfarmers
measures the attributes from the performances of the employees of the organization and
reward them accordingly. Vroom’s Expectancy Theory is also followed by the company. It
separates the effort, achievements and the consequences. Vroom's expectancy theory believes
that behaviour results from certain or attentive choices among options available whose
intention it is to inflate pleasure and to decrease pain. Vroom executed that an employee's
performance is based on exclusive factors such as identity, abilities, education, experience
and skills. It was stated that effort, achievement and encouragement are linked in a person's
motivation. The theory is based on three elements:
1. Expectancy – the faith that the effort will result in the desired goal. Based on the past
experiences of Wesfarmers, the company measures the self-confidence of the employees and
let them understand the difficulty to achieve the career as well as company objectives.
2. Instrumentality – this is the faith that the employees will receive a reward if they meet
achievement expectations. This helps the employees to work harder to be felicitated by

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Wesfarmers, who praises the right employee at the right time and the right place.
3. Valence – the worth of the place on the accolades. The key here is to set doable goals for
the employees and provide accolades that they really want. Accolades don’t have to come in
the form of hike in pay, bonuses or all-expenses paid nights out. Acclaims, scopes for
advancement and “employee of the month” style accolades can go for a long way in
motivating your employees.
For example, PWC recently offered total flexibility to all the employees of the
organization, the second positioned organization in the list of top employers of Australia. In
another case, KPMG, the number one Australian employer, commenced a campaign to
motivate their employees, which started on a historical video showing the involvement of the
company in historic events.
Recommendations
Based on the above analysis, it is obvious that Wesfarmers uses a number of effective
plan of actions to encourage their employees to work hard. Still, in order for the company to
keep their employees encouraged at the maximum level in modern day’s ever-changing
business environment, they not only need to carry on the use their current encouragement
strategies, but also need to guarantee that they are following the approaches in research on the
danger to employees’ motivation, such as a lack of participative decision making. To address
the concern of decreased motivation due to a lack of involved decision making, Wesfarmers
have to increase involved decision making by listening and considering employees’ ideas
when making business decisions, which is the way for the employees to be motivated to work
hard.

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Conclusion
From the above report, it can be concluded that Wesfarmers realizes business results
by continuously developing and training their employees, as well as motivating them enough
to give their best in their respective fields. The above discussed approaches provide ways and
means of making learning and development programs effective. The methods and approaches
followed by the Wesfarmers helps the employees to remain committed to the organization
and also makes them productive and successful.

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