Both structure and choice define Organic Valley’s hybrid work policy

It all started with a facilities meeting in February 2023. Executive leaders and the facilities team at organic foods producer Organic Valley were meeting to address facility constraint and workspace needs as the southwestern-Wisconsin-based cooperative moved toward calling employees back to the office.

Some people in the meeting—including Kimberly Turnmire, VP of organizational development—began to wonder: What problem are we actually here to solve for?

“Nobody wants to be told to come back to the office three days a week arbitrarily,” she said, adding that the group began to tease out the possibility of pausing the facilities conversation and instead design a company-wide, in-office work recommendation that would better fit Organic Valley.

“Pre-Covid [19 pandemic], most everybody came to the office most days of the week. If there was an arrangement that deviated from that, it was between, typically, the manager and the employee, and HR had no knowledge of it,” she said. “That was all kind of exacerbated when we came back, because initially, when we came back to the office, we had no consistent approach.”

A cross-functional group of leaders from HR, learning, employee communications, IT, and facilities was tasked with “creating clarity and consistency in our approach and our messaging across the entire company.”

The group identified core guide posts to a hybrid RTO policy: “We have to be able to operate a profitable business. We have to be able to remain a competitive employer. We have to be able to hear our employees in this process, and then we wanted to make sure that we thought about our cooperative culture,” she said.

By that November, Turnmire and her team had a plan to be implemented the following June.

Out of scope for this project were the cooperative’s desk-free and “outside” employees, such as field sales reps. The model was specific to what she described as Organic Valley’s desk-based employees, who could be:

• Low hybrid: Employees who work in the office three to five days a week.
• High hybrid: Employees who make an appearance in the office four to eight days a month.
• Remote: Employees who generally live more than 100 miles away from the office and work in a role that is high-hybrid eligible.

“We really felt strongly that whatever we did, ensuring that it’ll give employees as much as possible choice was really important,” she said.

The approach included a decision tree with questions like: Manage people? Onsite asset required? Is servicing others at the organization part of your work?

“We had this path that we could very clearly follow to figure out how eligible [you were] for different types of work,” she said. “We also set some criteria on this based on leadership level…employees at an individual contributor level are much more likely to have more heads-down, non-collaborative work than leaders. And so we drew a line…if you are in a role that is at a director level or above…remote is not an option for you.”

How’s it going? After Organic Valley deployed the policy in June, the team gathered feedback from employees and made some changes to its facilities to better group low-hybrid employees. The cooperative also deployed scheduling software for high-hybrid and remote employees to reserve space when they’re working in the office.

Recruitment has been an “early win,” according to Turnmire. HQ’d in a small rural town of 750 residents, drawing top talent has been an ongoing challenge.

“We have numerous examples of roles that we want to recruit for where our typical candidate pool might be 20 to 30 people, and by changing the job posting to reference hybrid eligibility, we’re seeing hundreds…literally seeing the candidates increase tenfold,” Turnmire said.

Turnmire said Organic Valley will use employee surveying in 2025 to measure impacts on the culture and engagement. Early surveying revealed “a rise in engagement survey scores—most notably in overall engagement, recommending this as a great place to work, and confidence in leadership,” according to Organic Valley CEO Jeff Frank.

The team also expects turnover to decrease, especially among employees with fewer than three years of tenure.

More to do. The move hasn’t come without challenges.

“Ensuring team members have a detailed work plan with clear job expectations is critical to maintaining accountability and driving results,” Frank suggested.

Turnmire told HR Brew the coop is still working on developing its more recalcitrant leaders when it comes to flexibility and remote work. The team is working out leadership development for best managing a hybrid team and IDing early adopters to help peer mentor those who might be struggling with the adjustment.

“In an ideal world, we would have done that before we implemented [a hybrid work policy], but there was such a strong desire to go ahead and give people this flexibility,” she said.