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Patagonia has gone to extreme lengths to understand how its employees think, feel, and act in their day-to-day working lives, its HR chief has revealed - including riding the subway with them.
Chief People Officer Theresita Richard revealed the clothing company’s novel approach at Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference earlier this week.
By building a deep understanding of the HR team’s “audience,” the CPO said, Patagonia has been able to deliver a better employee experience.
Why Patagonia ‘rode the subway’ with employees
To explain why Patagonia decided to ride the subway with staff on their way into work, Richard took the audience back a few stops earlier on the journey.
According to a report by PR Daily on Richard's session, one of Patagonia’s biggest HR challenges – like many other employers – is struggling to personalize their employee experience programs at scale and meet every employee’s unique needs, hopes, or desires.
Segmenting the audience (or workforce) and understanding their pain points is key, Richard explained, to helping them find their purpose within the company.
An employee experience audit at Patagonia, for example, revealed a significant gap between the satisfaction of corporate workers and front-line staff, including store and warehouse workers.
To solve the issue, Patagonia’s HR team decided to learn as much as possible about the daily experience of those workers and why they were feeling so unsatisfied.
“Getting close isn’t good enough,” the Chief People Officer said. “It’s very easy to say ‘I know the answer,’ but we needed to understand what our employees were genuinely experiencing.”
The strategy quickly became about proximity, immersing Patagonia’s comms team into the day-to-day lives of those employees, starting with staff working in retail and distribution centers.
By gathering perspectives on individual stories, experiences, and backgrounds, the company hoped to gather actionable insights that would lead to a more inclusive workplace where employee satisfaction feels personal.
How employee proximity shapes Patagonia’s HR strategy
Richard acknowledged that not all employers would have the time, budget, or capabilities to ‘ride the subway’ with staff, and suggested options like workshops and simply asking more questions could be a more viable alternative.
“Zoom in on their specific needs,” she added. “This means actively listening and identifying their highest priorities.”
Once insights have been gathered, the CPO advised, HR and people experience teams should look to spot patterns between staff and differences with the company’s existing approach.
For example, one employee said Patagonia’s reimbursement policy for wellbeing measures like massages and health-related services was good in theory but lacked practical support.
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Paying for a monthly gym membership was a better option for her lifestyle and finances, the worker suggested.
Richard used the story as an example that what an employer thinks is best and what an employee needs are often very separate things.
“Understanding these needs allows us to prioritize our attention and investment where it truly matters,” she said. “Decisive action should be taken based on the insights gathered from employees.”
Before rolling out any changes to the wider workforce, Patagonia first tests any action items using focus groups of the “highest impacted audience.”
‘Vibrant team culture’ or ‘full of ****?’
The company has long professed a commitment to the employee experience, with legendary founder Yvon Chouinard historically praising employees as crucial to the company’s success.
“We will keep doing all of the great things that built Patagonia, and the company will keep doing its best to be a great employer,” he wrote in an open letter in 2022 while ‘giving away’ the company.
Some employees criticized Patagonia last year, however, after bosses asked them to relocate across the US to one of seven central locations or to leave the organization, only giving them three days to make the life-changing decision.
Patagonia’s Chief Communications Officer, Corley Kenna, said the relocation strategy was “crucial” for the employer to “build a vibrant team culture,” noting that team members had complained about feeling disconnected from one another.
Some affected staffers were less optimistic, however. “It feels like they're full of shit, that they would rather spend their money on the world instead of their people,” one team member said.
Another said the company has changed since Chouinard’s step back, describing it as a “slow burn of shifting away from caring about employees.”
"Patagonia is not this small niche outdoor company anymore, it's a big corp in sheep's clothing,” they added. “I still think they made good products, but I think they don't treat their people as well as they claim to."
