Patagonia - one way to force the issue

If I were asked to imagine the work culture at Patagonia, I'd say it was outdoors-y (duh!), crunchy-granola, do-goody, and young. And very conscious of and committed to their workplace culture. 

But even the most crunchy-granola, do-goody companies sometimes have to have lay-offs. And Patagonia recently had to thin the ranks and pinkslip one-third of their customer service reps. During the pandemic, when we were all stuck in doors except for the times when we were all out experiencing the great outdoors on our own or with our pods, Patagonia had hired a lot of CSR's to staff their CX (Customer Experience) department - to the tune that they were "running 200-300% overstaffed for much of the year." I don't know how "200-300% overstaffing" gets resolved by getting rid of one-third of the workers, but layoff math does tend to get a bit squirrelly.

Anyway, a couple of weeks ago Patagonia informed 90 of their CSR's (CXR's) that they had a choice: they could relocate to live closer to one of Patagonia's seven hub cities or accept a severance package. 

All 90 of the pinkslipped are remote. But so are the 160 or so other CSR's/CXR's who didn't get the heave-ho offer. The other guys just happen to live within 60 miles of, and in the same state as, a hub city. (The hubs are Reno, Salt Lake City, Dallas, Austin, Chicago, Pittsburgh or Atlanta. None curiously, in California, where Patagonia HQ is located.)

Amazingly, for a do-goody, crunchy-granola company, Patagonia is as sucky at layoffs as almost every other company in the whole wide world, as demonstrated by the way the pinkslips were delivered.

On layoff Tuesday:

...the affected workers had their customers service calls shut down and were told to join a video conference “town hall” meeting with management.

"For the half an hour between when they turned the phones off and when they had the meeting, it was super anxious," the customer service employee said. "Nobody knew what was going to happen. They never do anything like this, an unscheduled meeting." (Source: Ventura County Star)

Oh, there are suckier ways - mass emails or texts, anyone? - but turning off systems access is right up there. (I once worked for a company that, a couple of days before a big layoff, edited the company contact list and put a "Z" before the names of everyone scheduled for the RIF. It didn't take long for someone to figure out that all you had to do was scroll to the bottom of the employee roster and see if your name had a "Z" in front of it all of a sudden.)

The reasoning behind locating closer to a hub was the importance of in-person culture. But the reps near the hub cities will still be allowed to work remotely, except for one in-person day per month.

“What we learned, with all of these employees being fully remote, is that our culture and some of the things that we really hold dear in our culture were suffering, because people weren’t together,” [spokesperson Corley Kenna] said.

The hope is that the remote reps will flock into the hub to:

..."participate in community events, film screenings, yoga, group runs, everything we offer at our locations,” Kenna said. “We’re Patagonia, so we love to encourage people to get outside together and engage with the community.” 

But, but, but...how does coming into your local hub once a month save the held-dear culture from suffering? Why couldn't a worker remoter-than 60 miles get into the hub for "in person connection" once a month and stay put in their home. (Employees at the California home office are expected to work in-person three days a week.)

I'm guessing that even though the reps will only be required to come in one day a month, they'll see the handwriting on the rock-climbing wall and realize that they better get their quarter-zip selves into the office a lot more than that for the group fun-fests.

The kicker here was that the impacted employees were given just three days to make the should I stay or should I go decision. Three days!

During the meeting, everyone listened in disbelief, according to the customer service employee who spoke with The Star. Having just three days to decide whether to move to Reno, Pittsburgh or any of the other cities was particularly upsetting, the employee said.

"It’s a huge decision to make if you're going to uproot your life and go to another city, and you're supposed to decide that in two or three days?" the employee said.

No surprise that most of the 90 CSR's/CXR's are taking the severance package. (Three days!!!) 

The package is reasonably good - a minimum of 13 weeks, 2 weeks per year for those who've been with Patagonia more than 6.5 years - and includes a year's work of medical insurance. So there's that.

And don't get me wrong. I'm a believer in workplace culture, and I think a strong, positive culture is best achieved when employees are all under one roof at least a couple of days a week. I like the hybrid model that many companies now have in place, with a couple of days working from home (eliminating commuting stress and giving employees more flex for running errands, etc.) and the rest in person.

It's just that Patagonia's way of forcing the issue strikes me as strange. Between the three-day take-it-or-leave it offer, and the only one day in person, I just don't get it. Not for a do-goody, crunchy granola company like Patagonia.