Human Resource

The Home Depot is quickly turning into a technology company as it builds relationships and partners with many tech vendors to improve different aspects of its business operations. This also includes its Human Resources initiatives for hiring and training. THD is also expanding its $50 million fund towards trades training with new education and job placement program called Path to Pro. The program aims to address the skilled labor gap by educating more people in the skilled trades, connecting skilled tradespeople with jobs and careers, and generating interest in trade professions through educational campaigns.

Hire/Retrain New/Current Employees

One example of how THD uses these programs and partnerships to benefit new and current employees is by developing new training opportunities to train and promote from within.

With a new mobile application called PocketGuide meant to improve associate competence and confidence, new associates can spend significantly less time in the back room learning and more time on the sales floor interacting with customers. The mobile application delivers product knowledge and learning activities to the palm of an associate’s hand. This use of this technology has benefits to the customer also, as it can enhance a customer’s experience by helping associates find the right product for a customer’s needs and showing them the correct questions to ask.

Management Flowchart & OODA Model

HR is a customer-centric support and service platform, where their most valuable customer is the employee. HR is there to serve the administrative needs of the company staff and to ensure the valuable human assets are happy, comfortable, sustainable, skilled, and productive (Boyer, 2014). Using the slightly more complicated OODA loop to orient knowledge and sustain employees within the company, a business can empower human assets to a higher ROI. The OODA loop operates on an assumption of continuous feedback, cross-referencing, empathy, correlation, and projection, as well as rejection, of data that is constant (Boyer, 2014).

During unfolding circumstances, using outside information (knowledge), and interaction with the team members (environment) they would make Observations. They would look for feedback from previous orientations, decisions, actions, and interactions within the environment. These observations would be fed forward into the Orientation process where multiple influences would be present, including cultural traditions (business policies, practices), genetic heritage (types of employees, generational, age, or heritage differences), new information, and previous experiences, to generate analysis and synthesis (Boyer, 2014). This oriented feed would then push forward to Decisions impacted by guidance and control (executive decisions, mentoring, contract requirements). The results should be an Action based on observations, orientation, and decisions in the feedback loop. The key word here is ‘loop’ – meaning it should be ongoing (Boyer, 2014).

Recognition-primed Decision Model

Recognition Primed Decision Making (RPD) is a model for the process of decision-making when people need to make quick and effective decisions in complex situations. After recognizing the problem, HR management can then identify its characteristics, including the goals, problem cues, expectations, and typical actions to take in the situation. After that, HR will think through the plan, conducting a mental simulation of the scenario to see if it works and making suitable modifications if necessary. If the plan is sufficient, HR can make a final decision. An alternative is only assessed if the initial plan does not work (Tough Nickel, 2022).