Whole Foods’ Shared Information Policy ~as organic as a cow pie

Whole Foods Market, the all-natural, organic retail food chain, has recently been gaining attention for their innovative “shared – information” policy.  Have you ever wondered how much moolah, emphasis on the “moooo”, your boss, or your co-worker, or your company CEO makes? Well, if you are a Whole Foods employee you have complete access to who is bringing home the bacon.

Any Whole Foods employee is able to access a company data base to view the prior year’s financial stats which include every employee’s salary and bonus record from stock boy up to CEO. Actually, Whole Foods advises their employees to openly compare salaries.

John Mackey, co-founder and co-CEO of Whole Foods introduced the company policy in 1986, saying that in order to build a high trust company this kind of open viewing is necessary. In addition to making salary data available each store must post their individual sales stats every day and employees vote on who is hired/fired and what benefit packages will be made available.  In doing so, Whole Foods hopes to create the image of “Teamwork” above all else and a caring, empathetic work environment for their employees.

So far, this may sound progressive and even inviting to many people, but let’s take a closer look. John Mackey also says the shared-information policy is in place to initiate conversation among staff, but more prominently to promote competition. Mr. Mackey goes on to say that he is very often confronted about salaries and when ask why someone is making more money than someone else, he replies “that person is more valuable.”

In that one statement Mr. Mackey invalidates his progressive thinking and regresses back to the good old American stereotype that money is somehow tied to the personal worth of people. If you make less money you are less valuable in the eyes of society. Does Mr. Mackey offer company employees equally accessible means to move up the Whole Foods ladder or is he only offering to ignite competitiveness in his employees?

If you Google search you will find that Whole Foods has routinely been faced with controversy over labor practices, and this is the same man that publicly stated “Unions were like having herpes.” 

You can be the best stock boy in the company, but incentive alone will not move you up the corporate ladder. Opportunity is key to success combined with secondary factors like hard work. Does the employee have the financial means and knowledge available to further education themselves for a higher paying position within the company?  Are the achievements to earn higher paying positions within the company reasonable to most employees, ie. Number of hours an employee may be expected to work and the amount of duties expected from that person?  Many former Whole Foods employees infer that work production expectations within the company are unrealistic.

Mr. Mackey doesn’t seem concerned with these questions. Why should he be when he can turn the focus toward cutthroat competition? Employees now have to openly fight each other in order to move up and in doing so are busy making Mr. Mackey a lot of money.

Telling an individual that another employee is “more valuable” is counterproductive to any kind of high trust, self –examining policy.  Within the company many people have deemed Whole Foods the Whole Paycheck for their policy’s that incite unnecessary competition among co-workers and the devaluing of lower paid staff. Those staff members are employees such as the stockers, the cashiers, the security, and the store managers that ultimately keep Mr. Mackey in business. They are not less valuable, but each contributes a valued part of the business which is what real teamwork is about, using the highest qualities of each employee for the good of the company as a whole.

It’s interesting that Mr. Mackey makes such assessments when he himself depended on the charity of others to start his business by borrowing a total of $45,000 from friends and family to open his first store. And in a 1981 flood Mackey lost $400,000 when that Austin store was severely damaged. Who helped Mackey recover the damages? Customers, neighbors, and store staff came together and charitably labored to help repair the damages; many of the very same people that John Mackey places less value on.

Had John Mackey not had the means to borrow a large sum of money or the chartable labor of community would he be as successful? We don’t know for sure, but we do know that hard work alone did not afford him that success.  

If John Mackey’s true intentions are to implement policies for the whole team then why is competition the primary focus? Instead of just seeing how much someone makes why not also include the skills, education, and process for which that person achieved in order to fulfill the duties of that pay grade, and how one might also garner those opportunities?  

The shared-information policy is not negative in itself, but implementing such a policy should be done with further consideration of how this will benefit the entire company workforce and not just John Mackey.

Whole Foods allows employees to vote on what benefit packages will be offered. This gives a real impression of empowering the staff, giving them control. Don’t be fooled by the smoke and mirrors so quickly though, upon further investigation we again see that implementing this part of the policy is not necessarily as employee empowering as one might think.

In the study of Child Development there is a parenting technique called the “choice technique”, in which the parent is encouraged to allow their child to make choices on their own, like what to wear to school, in order to give the child a sense of control over their own actions and teach them how to begin to make good decisions. The first part of this technique is for the parent to make the choices they want first, and then offer the child only choices that are acceptable to the parent, hence giving the illusion that the child is in control. What would you like to wear today? The green shirt, the yellow shirt, or the red sweatshirt? Three items mom/dad had already picked out.

This is exactly what Whole Foods does. Last year employees were offered a choice of three benefit packages to vote on, each preselected by the company, each offering a lesser accumulation of benefits then the package they currently had in place, hence only giving the illusion of control.

The “choice technique” is healthy for young children; it helps them understand the process of making decisions. Whole Foods employees are not preschoolers, Mr. Mackey. This is not empowerment. This is manipulation.

If Whole Foods truly wants what they are trying to publicly present with this policy, the wholesome, caring image, then there would be an avenue for open discussion between employees and upper management, as well as the practice of fair negotiation on votable issues, and more prominent access to opportunity to achieve a higher paying position within the company.  At present, it is a false promise of higher achievement.

Don’t tell us its chocolate cake and then serve us a cow pie. Not all organics are meant to be consumed. ©2014KikiColl