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I thought I had seen every possible hybrid work permutation. One, two, three days a week? Sure. Monday, Wednesday, Friday? Seen it. Tuesday through Thursday? The obvious choice.
Who knew that everyone would be outsmarted by the folks making peanut butter?
The Orrville, Ohio-based maker of American staples like Smucker’s jellies, Jif peanut butter and Folgers coffee, The J.M. Smucker Company has one of the most intelligent return-to-office plans I’ve seen.
Smucker’s Hybrid Twist
The national media may have touted Smucker’s decision as a return-to-office plan, but it’s really more of a hybrid plan. And unlike what’s happening at several organizations, this one seems to be working, as a Wall Street Journal article explains:
Smuckers has adopted a return-to-office strategy that is unusual among U.S. companies. The company expects its roughly 1,300 Orrville-based corporate workers to be on site as little as six days a month, or about 25% of the time, depending on their roles.
Employees are told to hit that threshold by coming in during 22 “core” weeks a year. Many employees can live anywhere in the U.S. so long as they pay their own way to get to Orrville for core weeks. This has led to a growing group of super-commuters who reside elsewhere but work in Orrville.
While this arrangement is unusual in the current context of hybrid work, it’s actually not that different from what remote working looked like before the pandemic.
For example, when I started working at Fort Worth, Texas-based The Starr Conspiracy more than a decade ago, I was living in Washington State. At the time, I would work remotely and come to the office for about a week every quarter to take meetings and bond with coworkers.
The Starr Conspiracy wasn’t the only one to operate that way. Other companies I worked remotely with in the past have had similar, episodic times when we would get together with one another. Nobody called it hybrid work, though. It was just a way to make sure that every employee could stay connected to the company, their coworkers and the culture.
So, Smucker’s strategy doesn’t get any point for originality, but it does show that what’s old can be new again.
Related Article: The Different Models of Hybrid Work
What’s Smucker’s Secret Recipe?
J.M. Smucker’s motto is, “With a Name Like Smucker's, It Has To Be Good.” So, what are they doing that other organizations can’t seem to emulate?
1. Low Real Estate Costs
Smuckers owns its headquarters outright, and the company is located in a small town with a small real estate footprint. Outside of property taxes and ongoing capital costs, Smuckers doesn’t have to worry about office utilization the same way a company located in midtown Manhattan or the San Francisco financial district does. The pressure to fill the office every day of every week simply isn’t there.
2. Centralized Location
If small-town living isn’t the life for Smucker’s employees, this hybrid scheme allows them the ability to live in many different places. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Columbus, Indianapolis and Cincinnati are all within very easy drives of Orrville. Given its placement in North Central Ohio, anyone living in a major city east of the Rockies has fairly easy flights to the area.
3. It Doesn’t Try to Equalize Schedules Between Blue- and White-Collar Staff
Smuckers is a manufacturer, so it operates 24/7. Obviously, production staff can’t participate in a hybrid schedule the same way office workers do. Many other manufacturers — as well as several organizations in other industries — say that reality of production staff vs. office staff is why they can’t offer more flexible scheduling, but that seems like an excuse. Core week scheduling is for people who can work away from their campus on a regular basis.
4. Even Core Weeks Are Flexible
Trying to make a flexible policy rigid is problematic from the start — and core weeks should be flexible, too. And that’s what Smuckers has understood. The company’s food scientists have to be at work most days because they need access to specialized lab and production equipment, so their core weeks look very different from other employees who, as the WSJ found, come to the office only once a month (or less) — and many others aren’t even staying for a full week during those core weeks.
Related Article: Conquering the Top 4 Hybrid Work Challenges
The Power of Customization
Some organizations may look at Smuckers and say they can’t apply the same model. And they’re probably right.
Smuckers has clearly spent a lot of time listening to employees about what they want to build a model that works for them. And according to the WSJ report, most of Smucker’s employees are happy with where they’ve landed.
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As a remote work maximalist, even I have to say that some of the rigor around getting together in person has a certain appeal. Even if it’s not for me, I can see why it works for some companies, including Smuckers. But how it works — those details that say when, where, how, who — are all aspects of hybrid work that should be carefully tailored to each company’s reality.
The most important point is that Smuckers tried to create a policy that covered most situations, not all of them. Even if a good policy covers 90% of employees, you’re still going to have 10% who are going to fall into different situations. Instead of trying to legislate every possible iteration, the company chose to commit to the spirit of the guidance rather than the letter of the law.
So, even if your company can’t do exactly like Smucker did, there’s a lot to take away from that approach.
