Analyzing People, Culture, and Leadership at Woolworths Group

This report provides an analysis of people, culture, and contemporary leadership within Woolworths Limited, encompassing its vision, mission, growth, and employee strength. It identifies and evaluates the organization's HR strategy, focusing on policies, structure, and activities, while also assessing the current state of employee engagement. The report outlines a structured plan of initiatives aimed at enhancing employee engagement over time, emphasizing the importance of aligning HR practices with business outcomes, improving communication with leaders and managers, and developing management strength through targeted programs. The conclusion highlights Woolworths' dedicated HR department and its strategic and functional approach to HR, including retention strategies and performance review methods.

Running head: PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP
People, Culture and Contemporary Leadership
Name of the Student:
Name of the University:
Author Note:

1PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP
Executive Summary:
The aim of this report is to provide an insight into people, culture and contemporary leadership
in the context Woolworths Limited. Woolworths Limited represents a collection of the chains,
divisions and brands of the Woolworths Group. Through the report, one can find the overview of
the organization in terms of vision and mission statement, growth, total employee strength and
the branches. The report also puts forward a discussion on identifying human resource (HR)
strategy within organization. One will also be find the evaluation of the HR practices in
Woolworths in terms of policies, structure and relevant activities. The report also provides an
overview of the current situation of the employee engagement along with a discussion of a
structured plan of initiatives for enhancing the employee engagement over the time.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Company Overview.........................................................................................................................3
HR Strategy of the Organization.....................................................................................................4
Evaluation of HR Practices within the Organization.......................................................................5
Current State of Employee Engagement..........................................................................................6
Initiatives of HR for Increasing Employee Engagement.................................................................7
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................8
References:......................................................................................................................................8

3PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP
Introduction
The report aims at providing an insight into the people, culture and contemporary
leadership in the context of a chosen organization. The organization chosen here is Woolworths
Limited, a compilation of the divisions, chains, and brands of the Woolworths Group
(woolworthsgroup.com.au 2018). The report will provide an overview of organization including
the growth, vision and mission statement, structure, total strength of workforce and the branches.
The report will also help in identifying the human resource (HR) strategy within the
organization. The will also focus on the evaluation of the HR practices within the organization in
terms of the structure, policies and the relevant activities. The report will also try to evaluate the
present state of employee engagement within the organization along with a structured plan that
will help in increasing the employee engagement overtime.
Company Overview
Woolworths Group is one of the largest food retailers of Australia whose primary
operations include liquor retailing, supermarkets and hotels and pubs under the umbrella of the
Australian Leisure and Hospitality (ALH) group. In terms of growth, the net profit of the
company rose by 37.6 percent in December 2017 (woolworthsgroup.com 2018). In terms of
structure, Woolworth Group represents one of the second largest organizations in Australia in
terms of the revenue. It also represents one of the largest takeaway liquor retailer and the poker
machine operator and hotels in Australia. The mission and vision of the company lies in
appealing to the customers across the world. Therefore, Woolworths Group focuses on building
store and customer led culture and team. The company also ensures generating sustainable sales
momentum in food along with evolvement of the drinks business in providing more convenience

4PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP
and value to the customers. Woolworths Group also tries to empower their portfolio business for
pursuing strategies and delivering them to the shareholder. The company also focuses on
becoming a lean retailer through the adoption of system excellence and end-to-end process.
Presently, Woolworths Group has employee strength of 202,000 (woolworthsgroup.com 2018).
Woolworths Group has various branches in various parts of Australia and United States.
HR Strategy of the Organization
There is a dedicated human resource department of the Woolworths Group focused
at ensuring the effectiveness of employee management of an organization. The company has
designed and adopted human resource strategies based on developing and recruiting talent,
matching the staffing with the requirements of the business, training, retraining and downsizing
of the staffs. Woolworths Group also outsources some of the functions of the human resource
and hence the organization follows a business process human resource (HR) outsourcing (Cascio
2018). This helps the Woolworths Group in managing the distinct activities of the HR that
included payroll administration or recruitment.
However, the manual, complex and aging human resources challenged the ability of the
Woolworths Group in sustaining growth (woolworthsgroup.com.au 2018). The company thus
started a human resource transformation program for achieving the mission of high performance
through elimination of complicated paper supported solutions so that the HR primarily focuses
on the four functional core areas of the company that revolves around leadership, talent,
employee recognition and awards and organizational effectiveness. The Woolworths Group
stands apart in bringing about transformation through empowering the HR manages that remain
accountable in not only developing people but also providing the employees with the ability of

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managing and owing their careers along with increasing the both away communication process
across businesses. Thus, for staying ahead in business meetings and the customer expectations
the organization ensured an implementation of end-to-end human capital management system.
Evaluation of HR Practices within the Organization
There are three major levels of operations of a HR manager includes the functional
level, operational level and the strategic level. At the Woolworths Group, HR practices are
undertaken both the functional and the strategic level. At the functional level, the practitioners
ensure the management of the employees whereas the strategic level mostly involves human
resource and corporate planning by line managers. However, the functions of the human
resources department of Woolworths Group in terms of policies, structure and other relevant
activities involve:
Selection and Recruitment: The quality of employee in Woolworths is dependent on
the effective strategy of HR for the selection and recruitment of the employees (Armstrong and
Taylor 2014). However, the strategy for selection as well as recruitment is not a smooth sailing
process. Employers across the organizations can face issues like the advertising cost of job
openings or issues related to the improvement of interaction between the recruiters and the hiring
managers. This is where the role of HR comes into play.
Development and Retention: The HR manager at Woolworths Group focuses on
certain major practices for retaining the top talent (Goetsch and Davis 2014). The HR manager
tries to recruit the most suitable employees at the first place and improve the line manager’s
ability in managing the employees. The HR department also plays the role of providing
necessary feedback to the employees on a continuous basis. The HR practices of Woolworths

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also help in empowering the employees towards moving forward in the path of career growth.
They also help in increasing the productivity of the employees by increasing the level of their
motivation. Being one of the most famous retail organizations the HR practices focuses on
continuously improving the business strategies along with the retention strategies to ensure
employee retention.
Ensuring Performance Review of Employees: The human resource practice in
Woolworths involves undertakes self-evaluation for reviewing employee performance. At
Woolworths Group the employees are given time for evaluating themselves and understanding
their performance (Kim 2014). Further, the HR practice also involves evaluating the perception
of the employee about the job skills that helps them in calibrating their own responses and also
provide necessary feedback.
Current State of Employee Engagement
Employee Engagement refers to the approach in a workplace those results in exact
condition that motivates the employees in delivering their best performance in accordance to the
values and goals of the organization thereby contributing to the organizational success (Haski‐
Leventhal 2013). There also persists an enhanced sense of well being amongst the employees. In
Australia, employees tend to spend two thirds of their waking hours on job. Insecurity, work
related stress and personal problems are some of the reasons that contributes not only to
absenteeism but also turnover and low morale. This leads to the enhancement of the injuries due
to time loss. This results in a situation where employees are present but are not productive. When
the companies in Australia are looking for means of gaining competitive advantage, it is the
workforce acts as the largest reservoir of potential. Presently, it is found that, 25 percent of the

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employees remains engaged, 25 percent remains actively disengaged while the rest of the 50
percent are trying enough for keeping out of the trouble (Suan, Mat and Al-Omari 2013).
Thus, Australia has a crisis related to employee engagement that has potentially and
serious lasting repercussions on the future innovation and the economy (Schermerhorn et al.,
2014). In reality, when the companies focuses exclusively on measuring the engagement instead
of improving the engagement they fail to discover the required changes that would engage the
employees
Initiatives of HR for Increasing Employee Engagement
The initiatives that the HR can undertake for enhancing the employee engagement include
(Evans, Chitnomrath and Christopher 2013):
 Focusing on the Business Outcomes: The HR is able to enhance the engagement of the
employees through delivery of positive impact on the organizational performance. They
can enhance business value of the engaged employees by adopting the following
initiatives:
a. Through setting up a meeting for discussing business approach, employee
impact, risks, requirements of each of the staff members and employee segments
b. Compiling the data for linking engagement scores to the business outcomes
c. Ensuring steady course of engagement even when the organization seems
engulfed by the unexpected waves

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 Communicating well with the Leaders and Managers: The HR professionals should be
able in crafting a narrative that helped in portraying the voice of the employees. This can
be done through:
a. Development of a communication plan for all the planned program and initiatives
of HR.
b. Ensure engaging the managers in the annual milestones of people planning
c. Ensure the engagement of the key manager in dealing with the team challenges
while increasing their understanding with the challenges of the overall business
 Development of the Management Strength: Frequent communication helps in fostering
motivation, desire and awareness amongst the managers for engaging people. This
requires further enhancement of the skills which they can do by:
a. Reviewing the process of recruitment, selection, development and the reward process
for the managers
b. Through assessing the strengths of the employees on engagement
c. Ensuring that they are able to understand relationship between the levels of
engagement and the teams
d. Initiation of the management and leadership development program for addressing the
capability of employee engagement

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Conclusion
The report concludes by providing an insight into the initiatives undertaken by the HR for
enhancing the employee engagement. The report also discusses about the current state of
employee engagement in an organization. The report also undertakes evaluation of HR practices
within Woolworths Group along with providing an overview of the company. It can however be
mentioned from the report that Woolworth has a dedicated human resource department and
follows both the strategic and functional level of HR functioning. The organization also ensures
maintenance of all the retention levers that has helped the organization in implementing a
suitable method of performance review through self-evaluation.

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References:
Armstrong, M. and Taylor, S., 2014. Armstrong's handbook of human resource management
practice. Kogan Page Publishers.
Cascio, W., 2018. Managing human resources. McGraw-Hill Education.
Evans, R.T., Chitnomrath, T. and Christopher, T., 2013. Successful turnaround strategy:
Thailand evidence. Journal of Accounting in Emerging Economies, 3(2), pp.115-124.
Goetsch, D.L. and Davis, S.B., 2014. Quality management for organizational excellence. Upper
Saddle River, NJ: pearson.
Haski‐Leventhal, D., 2013. Employee engagement in CSR: The case of payroll giving in
Australia. Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management, 20(2), pp.113-128.
Kim, H.K., 2014. Work-life balance and employees' performance: The mediating role of
affective commitment. Global Business and Management Research, 6(1), p.37.
Schermerhorn, J., Davidson, P., Poole, D., Woods, P., Simon, A. and McBarron, E.,
2014. Management: Foundations and Applications (2nd Asia-Pacific Edition). John Wiley &
Sons.
Schoenberg, R., Collier, N. and Bowman, C., 2013. Strategies for business turnaround and
recovery: a review and synthesis. European Business Review, 25(3), pp.243-262.
Suan Choo, L., Mat, N. and Al-Omari, M., 2013. Organizational practices and employee
engagement: a case of Malaysia electronics manufacturing firms. Business Strategy Series, 14(1),
pp.3-10.

11PEOPLE, CULTURE AND CONTEMPORARY LEADERSHIP
woolworthsgroup.com 2018. [online] Available at:
https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/about-us/The_Woolworths_Story/
How_We_Were_Founded/ [Accessed 6 Apr. 2018].
woolworthsgroup.com.au 2018. [online] Available at: https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/
[Accessed 6 Apr. 2018]
woolworthsgroup.com.au 2018. [online] Available at:
https://www.woolworthsgroup.com.au/page/community-and-responsibility/group-responsibility/
[Accessed 6 Apr. 2018].