Introduction Costco is the American membership-only warehouse club that provides a wide selection of merchandise. It is the third largest retailer in United States of America. The company is a public listed company that was established in the year 1976. In the last 38 years, company has evolved a lot. In this time the organizations functions have also evolved and today, Human Resource Management function has emerged as an important business function. There was a time when HRM was considered as a reactive function in the organization and with time HRM has evolved as a proactive function. The management of Costco has realized that human resources are their biggest assets. The management has realized that competition has been high in retail …show more content…
The management of Costco has focused to create a knowledge management framework where collaboration among all the internal and external stakeholders could be high. The management of company realized that organizational learning framework and HR policies could not be same for all the employees. The management believes that the learning environment in an organization could also depend on the type of industry and group of employees. For example, it could be possible that line workers in an assembly line in a manufacturing organizations have less of the learning culture as compared to engineers in a service based IT firm. Therefore, it is important for management to have an understanding of both internal and external factors before focusing on learning platform. The objective of this paper is to discuss the human resource management principles being practiced at Costco. The paper would also discuss the organizational structure and communication strategy being used by the company. The paper would also compare the strategies of Costco vis-à-vis retail industry in USA and some recommendations for Costco would also be …show more content…
HR at Costco and ethical practices
The management of Costco believes that ethics should be integrated with competency of employees. Ethics enables competency, but it does not identify what competence is though. One thing is to have required set of skills to perform a job; another thing is to have a true professionalism along with knowledge and skills to perform a job.
The management of Costco believes that adopting universal codes of conduct and maintaining transparent ethical standards could form the strategic solution to avoid frictional rifts in management. The intangibles of the job cannot just be easily disposed at any given time as one likes because these are innately the qualities that is individually attached to a person’s being. Although it can be developed as time goes by through experience, there are still soft skills that are connected to the natural