Workforce & Community Capability Building

Employees want challenging, meaningful work. Our goal is to build the capability of our workforce and our community to successfully navigate an uncertain and rapidly changing environment.

We provide opportunities for employees to develop their skills, positively contribute with their professional strengths and make the most of their career.

RecruitingWe recruit people with strong leadership potential. Our companies have longstanding recruiting relationships with 13 universities nationwide. We also use digital outreach to enhance our efforts at these schools and to reach additional students where we seek to supplement our talent pipelines. Each year, we offer students paid co-ops or internships and many of these interns begin their careers with an Altria company after they graduate.

In addition to our valued university partnerships, we engage several organizations that support diverse students. Some of these partnerships include the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, Association of Latino Professionals for America and Management Leadership for Tomorrow. We recruited 12 diverse intern candidates through these partnerships in 2020.

Part of our strategy of building a diverse and capable talent pipeline includes our efforts to hire employees with demonstrated leadership capabilities. In 2020, we hired 339 new employees, helping to address turnover, fill important skill gaps needed for the future and provide diverse, outside perspective to our functional teams.

Development

The Learning & Development team at Altria Client Services focuses on creating modern learning experiences that advance Our Cultural Aspiration and build capabilities for our employees. They focus on providing learning and development opportunities that align with individual employees’ career and development plans and are designed to improve employee capability and productivity, contribute to Our Cultural Aspiration and drive business results.

In 2020, the Learning & Development team launched a new talent platform called myPath that brings together learning and development, performance and career planning. The myPath platform includes almost 10,000 learning modules and videos that cover myriad of topics from inspirational leadership to problem solving. The catalog includes access to popular TED Talks, LinkedIn Learning opportunities, internally created Human Resources resources and manages a roster for virtual and classroom trainings.

87,100 Hours
of myPath
Training & Development
Completed in 2020.

The platform also supports the annual development plan process for salaried employees by outlining and tracking progress toward their annual performance objectives and metrics that drive individual learning, performance and career planning. Accountability against performance objectives, alongside coaching and feedback from managers on at least a quarterly basis, empowers employees to take ownership and actively participate in their career plans.

Annually, management evaluates employee performance against their objectives. The results of these assessments determine a salaried employee’s incentive compensation through our pay-for-performance model, which recognizes higher levels of performance with higher variable compensation awards.

Rewarding & Recognizing Our Employees

Our compensation program helps us attract, retain and motivate world-class talent. Depending on level, total compensation can include different elements – base pay, annual cash incentives, long-term stock and cash incentives, and benefits. Our goal is to provide total target compensation packages between the 50th and 75th percentile of our peer companies, meaning our compensation is targeted to be better than a significant portion of companies we compete with for employees.

Our peer-to-peer recognition system, Snap, continues to serve as a tool to shine a spotlight on outstanding performance and everyday excellence. Snap enables employees across our companies to recognize each other for embodying Our Cultural Aspiration in how we show up for each other - and to our external partners and stakeholders. In 2020, employees gave or received a total of 118,328 peer-to-peer recognitions on Snap.

Veteran Hiring Strategy

About six percent of Altria's total workforce self-reports as talent from the armed services veteran population. In order to achieve our aiming points of eight percent of veteran representation enterprise-wide, as well as six percent veteran representation at the director level and above, the Altria Client Services Talent Acquisition team is focusing on three key areas. Recruiting, Communication and Training.

Building a Diverse Talent Pipeline

Continued focus on diversity in our recruiting process resulted in our most diverse intern class ever – 58% of 2020 interns were people of color, a 16-percentage point increase from last year. This included partnership with diversity organizations at our focus schools, community partners, including Thurgood Marshall College Fund which focuses on public Historically Black Colleges and Universities, and using digital tools for outreach to enhance diversity in our recruiting process.

employees painting wall at the boys and girls club

Learn more about our efforts to promote Employee Safety, our Enhanced Workplace Benefits & Policies and how we support our Communities in our Supporting Our Employees & Communities report.

Change Leadership

The market Altria competes in has become increasingly disrupted and we needed to adapt to compete successfully.

change leadership

people & communities

Investing in Employees through Skilled Trade Career Pathways

Altria is investing in skilled trade and apprenticeship programs to set up its employees for meaningful, long-term careers. Hear from one of PM USA's electrician apprentices and what the program means to him.

Read Our Story