Most professionals would give almost anything for greater control over their schedules—and many would even take a pay cut to get it. Now, one of America’s biggest agricultural businesses is letting employees take the wheel in shaping their workdays instead of asking them to fit around the job.
Land O’Lakes first introduced flex jobs at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic, in early 2022. Participants in the part-time program tell the company what times they’d like to work, and Land O’Lakes comes back with a slot that fits in their schedules. Most flex talent at the billion-dollar company log about 16 to 30 hours of work every week, with shifts built around employees’ availability rather than a fixed schedule. The famed food giant selling butter sticks, whipped spreads, and shredded cheeses changed its policy after flexibility became workers’ top priority, assembling a small HR team to test out the program at select sites.
“Regardless of work, location, generation, [or] type of work—flexibility, work-life balance—was one of the key things that we heard from across our organization,” Julie Sexton, chief human resources officer at Land O’Lakes, tells Fortune.
“The chief supply chain officer—who’s now retired—really came forward like: ‘Let’s challenge our notion here,’” she adds. “‘If everybody’s saying flexibility is important, we need to step beyond the paradigm of: that can’t happen in manufacturing environments.’”
