Whole Foods sees excursions as crucial

Mimi Leduc said she never experienced a corporate outing before two years ago, when she joined the Whole Foods Market staff at University Heights in Providence. And for what it’s worth, she said, she wouldn’t want to work for a place without such programs.
Last year, her department took a day trip to Coggeshall Farm in Bristol, where the group fixed fences, built a pig pen, cleared brush for a weekend festival, then participated in old-time games such as sack races, three-legged races and a hammer and nail competition.
The day ended with a picnic at Colt State Park.
“People relate to each other better now,” said Leduc, who is kitchen manager of the prepared foods department. “We’re all one team, one department, but the front of house is different from the back of house. [At the outing] those two got to interact. … It helped me understand [front of house] better. It helped me appreciate my co-workers.”
Whole Foods calls outings like that “team builds,” said Jewel Gregson, marketing team leader for the University Heights store. To Gregson’s knowledge, the company has made the program part of corporate culture from day one.
“Each team [or department] is encouraged to do a team build, at least one per year,” Gregson said. “And they are encouraged to do something philanthropic.”
For instance, the store’s customer service department cleaned up a portion of Narragansett Bay in conjunction with Save the Bay. Other departments have sorted donated food for the Rhode Island Community Food Bank.
“The team builds are one of the many things that separate us from other grocery shops,” Gregson said. “When folks come back … they’re a more united team.”
They are also more productive, she said, because “when you feel closer to the people on your team it’s easier to work beside them, to help them out and to work toward a common goal.”
And the company pays employees for the activity as if it were a regular work day.
Now the Whole Foods store is taking the concept of team builds to a whole new level by offering them as a service to companies and nonprofits in the community at large.
The idea came after Holly Dion, the store’s new culinary specialist, started receiving requests from customers to conduct cooking classes.
And a special request from Jeremy Thelen, educational leader at The Met School in the Shepard Building in Providence, to conduct a cooking class for his staff prompted the idea that it could be used as a team-building exercise for others.
“I was trying to think of something we haven’t done,” Thelen said. “We’re all about hands-on experience here, and we all like to eat, so it seemed like a good idea.”
In addition, he said, it’s a way of showing appreciation to Whole Foods for all the store has done for The Met in the past. The University Heights store has donated food and toiletries to the students so they could participate in a project to help the homeless.
The store also carries Big Picture Soda, an all-natural soda the students developed and are now marketing and selling to raise funds for a scholarship for Met seniors to use for college.
Thelen’s staff participates in eight to 12 team-building activities per year. The activities make working relationships easier, he said. And they increase the staff’s ability to work together to come up with solutions to problems they face with students.
“The social capital built through these activities pays off multiple-fold,” he said.
In addition to team-building, Dion said she hopes the cooking class gets the Met staff excited about cooking. She plans to teach the group not only how to follow recipes, but also how to cook products in ways they might not be aware. She might teach them how to use the root vegetable jicama to make slaw or how to prepare kale as a side dish.
Dion said she might also teach the staff about local produce, such as the pawpaw fruit, which a vendor is turning into pawpaw chutney that is going to be sold at Whole Foods.
The Met cooking class team build will take place this month. Gregson said it is the first team build, to her knowledge, that any Whole Foods in the country is conducting for an outside entity.
The concept is “somewhat new” for Whole Foods as a corporation, she said. It is also free, because the store sees it as a way to “get our name out there.”
Dion said the new program is an example of what drew her to the company in the first place. She joined Whole Foods about a year ago, after being a chef in the restaurant industry for 18 years, partly because she gets the opportunity to educate people on how to eat healthily, she said.
“It’s just a wonderful place to work,” she said. “I get to take that passion I have for food and freshness and local product and share that passion with others.”