General Mills Total Rewards Corporate

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Total Reward Program

General Mills is a major food producer with a stable business selling packaged foods to supermarkets. The company earned $17.9 billion in revenue in 2014, and on that took home $1.8 billion in net income (MSN Moneycentral, 2015). According to its 2014 Annual Report, the company sees its strategy as "putting the consumer first." The company competes by connecting with consumers and developing "deep insight into what they like to eat, where they shop for food and how they approach cooking" (p.1). The company notes that the industry in the developed world is mature, with just 1.5% growth in the U.S., slower than overall industrial sales growth. Input costs, however, were up 4%, creating a challenging operating market (2014 Annual Report). The report's explanation of the company's business indicates that General Mills is primarily a marketing-driven company, developing products and utilizing channels suited to getting goods to the customer.

This paper will examine the key human resources needs for General Mills. The company has around 43,000 employees, spread across a large number of divisions. In addition to marketing, the company needs to have substantial production expertise in order to handle the misalignment between rising costs on the input side and the sluggish sales growth. By identifying the human resources needs of General Mills, it will be possible to design a total rewards program that will complement other human resources strategies in order to meet the overall needs of the company. The total rewards program is the central element to this paper, and will reflect the rewards strategies best aligned with the overall performance objectives of General Mills.

Summary of the Organization

General Mills is one of the leading food producers in the United States. Its domestic market share in major categories ranges from 9.1% in frozen pizza (Totino's) to 70% in refrigerated baked goods (Pillsbury). General Mills' organizational chart is cluttered. There are senior executives for product categories (e.g. "meals," "frozen foods"), for geographic regions (e.g. Canada, Australia/New Zealand) and for functions (e.g. supply chain, compliance, investment). Jacqueline Williams-Roll is the Senior Vice-President for Human Resources Operations. She has performed HR duties with several divisions -- supply chain, finance, marketing and organizational effectiveness (General Mills, 2015). This again indicates that there is only a minimal amount of centralization of the human resources function at General Mills.

One of the core values of General Mills is "innovation in all aspects of business," and another is "investing in, respecting and developing employees," which makes these two core values the most relevant in the development of a total rewards program. Investing in and developing employees reflects a strategy where the company finds good people, provides them with training and upward mobility, and seeks to retain the people in whom they have invested. Innovation is interesting, because many times in mature industries innovation is not that important, but in this case General Mills actually launches dozens if not hundreds of new products every year. Many will ultimately not succeed, but having an innovation pipeline of new products is one of the key ways for this company to succeed, and keep its product lines fresh.

General Mills also relies on having employees who can learn fast, be creative, communicate effectively and work as part of a team. Part of this comes from hiring well, but part will come from being able to take employees who have the right attributes with respect to hard work and willingness to learn, and training them to do the rest. The major challenge for General Mills will be to ensure that this is done consistently throughout the organization, despite the fact that there are many different companies, each doing their own hiring, and there may be a mash-up of different organizational cultures, and further there may be chain of command issues given the cluttered nature of the organizational chart.

Total Rewards at General Mills

Total rewards is a human resources concept that reflects the reality that people work for a company for a variety of different reasons. Each reason is a 'reward', and the mix of these rewards will be a key driver of what type of employee the company attracts, on its retention rate, and on other human resource metrics. Ultimately, a total rewards program should allow for the organization to meet its strategic objectives. Employees look for the following categories of rewards from their employers: compensation, benefits, work-life, performance recognition and development.

General Mills' own core values hint at the latter two being important, and the first two are standard at any company.

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There is not as much mention about work-life in the company's literature. The head of HR is a good example of how career opportunity and development works. Ms. Williams-Roll had progressive positions, taking advantage of the large number of divisions and departments within the company to build her internal resume to the point where she reached the executive ranks. By allowing employees to move around within the company, General Mills provides ample development opportunity, but also encourages innovation. This works because employees who have exposure to a large number of operating groups will be able to transfer ideas between these groups effectively, to look at problems in different ways and to utilize solutions developed at one division to creatively solve problems in another. By allowing people to forge diverse development pathways, the company creates a situation whereby knowledge transfer is facilitated, a common organizational culture can be developed, and where talented employees will never lack for opportunity, all positive aspects that contribute to the company meeting its overall performance objectives.

Another area within the total rewards program at General Mills that is worth discussing is the benefits package. The company's benefits package involves annual enrollment. This strategy helps the company keep its costs down, and allows the employees to choose from a buffet menu. This is something that is done on a centralized basis at the company, so that each unit works the same with respect to the benefits program (Kofski, 2012). The benefits offered are not unusual -- the normal medical, dental and insurance packages are available. A third area is performance and rewards. The company seeks to tie its performance management to rewards in an explicit way, so that employees can see a direct link between their performance and the rewards that they receive. Again, this element of the company's total rewards program is developed centrally, but is implemented at the division level (Kofski, 2012). The performance and rewards process is annual, but there is an imperative at the company to have the rewards as close as possible to the event that precipitates the reward (Kofski, 2012). The rewards include signing bonuses, which average $3,360, and 100% of new hires receive a performance bonus in their first year, at an average of $2,070 (Business Week, 2007). The signing bonuses and education reimbursement programs are designed to help the company have a highly-educated workforce, and to attract new college graduates, in order to keep the workforce fresh and innovative. General Mills notes in their 2014 Annual Report that they need to be in tune with the food tastes of millennials, who number 80 million. Attracting millennials is the only real way to effectively develop new food products for that generation.

Segmentation of the Workforce

There are a number of ways to segment the workforce. With 43,000 employees, General Mills has a lot of employees who are involved in basic tasks such as food production, but the company is largely a marketing company and needs to have a high level of system-wide innovation in order continually launch new, successful products. The workforce therefore has a diverse range of drivers. For many production workers in particular, wages, benefits and stability are the key drivers. But for people on the marketing and product development side, the key drivers are development opportunity and performance recognition. For such workers, pay is less important because they are the architects of their careers -- if they want more pay they will work harder and earn promotions. So there are two distinct groups of employees. The second group, the strivers, may ultimately be split between those at higher levels who are seeking a pathway to the executive suite, and those at lower levels who simply wish to see opportunity. The company promotes what it calls a "glass door" policy, meaning that it provides opportunity to those who want it, knowing that it will serve as a motivator. The split between the two groups of employees roughly reflects those in transactional roles -- repetitive jobs that need to be executed to perfection -- and roles that are more transformative in nature. Marketing and innovation staff in particular need to have a lot of creativity in order to understand the markets they serve, and to find ways to serve those markets.

Current Needs

Arguably, while much of the workforce is transactional, driven by stability and high pay for performance, their needs are also relatively simple. Less simple are the needs of….....

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