Talent Management - November 2008 - (Page 41)

solely e-learning. Most organizations adopt a blended learning approach, and we believe it will greatly enhance our instructor-led classroom learning initiatives that we have right now. TM: How does Dollar Tree change or create leadership and management behaviors that lead to top-tier workforce performance? That’s been another challenge for us. I’ll start by talking about our approach to performance appraisals. We have a twofold component to our performance management, or performance appraisal, process. One is the establishment of goals that support our corporate initiatives. In addition to people being evaluated on the accomplishment of their personal goals — and for us that represents what you did last year — we also have a set of responsibilities or behaviors that represent how you go about accomplishing your goals. We’re very clear what those behaviors or responsibilities are. Everyone in the organization in a leadership position is evaluated on their performance relative to those responsibilities or behaviors. That’s also a part of our succession planning process, where we assess the talent in our organization relative to their behaviors. And then, depending on the individual, we’ll either have them participate in internally developed programs or internally generated training programs or, for high-potential candidates with special needs, we’ll send them to outside learning and development opportunities. Kaufman: sation, merit-increase or our bonus programs. We didn’t have the opportunity to look at people relative to other people in the organization, so getting everyone on the same performance management cycle has been an incredible way for us to manage our rewards program, and that includes merit increases, bonuses, compensation. And it’s been a real eye-opening opportunity for us to look at the talent organization relative to everybody else. TM: Kaufman: How does Dollar Tree develop its culture and employee attitudes? I would say the largest one is we have 3,500 stores geographically dispersed across the United States, and at the moment we don’t have an e-learning or a distance-learning component to our training. So delivering consistent training to our associates across the 48 contiguous states is our biggest special need and our largest challenge. TM: Kaufman: What kind of challenges impact talent management at Dollar Tree? I don’t know any organization that would say their culture wasn’t important to them. But one of the difﬁculties in maintaining our culture is the signiﬁcant growth that we’ve experienced over the last 22 years. Now we’re in 48 states with 3,500 stores, and how do you identify that culture and maintain it? Our on-boarding programs for new associates, which can last up to a year, emphasize the Dollar Tree culture in a number of different ways. That’s one aspect of it. There are two others. One, embodying the behaviors and values of our culture is part of what people are assessed on in succession planning. If you were going to be a high-potential candidate at Dollar Tree, it’s imperative that you embody the behaviors that represent our culture and values. The third piece we’re working on right now is formalizing an associate engagement survey and a cultural survey so we can actually measure what people believe the culture is [and] then determine how far we are from what we actually want the culture to be versus how people experience it in the ﬁeld. That will be a 2009 initiative. It’s going to be imperative to implement some sort of e-learning or distance-learning approach to the training portion of what we do here so we can deliver a consistent message and be able to track people’s history. We’re working on that as we speak. It won’t be TM: Kaufman: Have you developed any solutions to meet that challenge? TM: What programs have you established to attract, recruit and retain top talent? November 2008 Insight continued on page 45 talent management magazine www.talentmgt.com 41 http://www.talentmgt.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Talent Management - November 2008

Talent Management - November 2008 Editor’s Letter Contents Human Performance Leading Edge Learning Connections Recruitment & Retention Assessment & Evaluation Compensation & Benefits Performance Management Learning & Development Succession Planning Insight Dashboard Application Advertisers’ Index Editorial Resources Full Potential

Talent Management - November 2008

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