Employee Commuting

Commuting is necessary for our employees to operate our stores, distribution centers and headquarters. While we offer public transit subsidies and many of our employees choose to bike to work, the majority of our employees commute in single occupancy vehicles. In 2008, we made significant progress in understanding the challenges and opportunities of our employee commuting footprint. More about the details of how we calculate this climate impact can be found in the methodology appendix.

Highlights

A combination of innovative pilot programs and a Washington State grant helped to reduce the CO2 impact per employee at our headquarters by 21 percent. Through this work, the rate of single-occupancy commuting dropped from 66 percent in 2007 to 50 percent in 2008, nearly making single-occupancy commuting the "alternative" form of commuting at our headquarters' location. In addition, many of our motivated retail employees have continued grassroots efforts to promote and encourage alternative commuting. As reported in our 2007 stewardship report, divisional teams at our headquarters are utilizing a customized work environment, enabling flexibility for employees to compressed their weeks (i.e, four, 10-hour shifts) or working remotely from home.

Challenges

We are working to understand the unique commuting opportunities and obstacles for each of our locations, but it remains a daunting undertaking. Because different locations require different solutions, a one-size-fits-all strategy won't work. We are starting to understand the fundamental challenges to commuting for each of our facilities, and solutions will require new collaboration with public transit and other stakeholders.

The record high gas prices in the summer of 2008 changed commuting behavior at some of our locations—but not at many others. In areas where little public transit infrastructure existed, our employees had few alternatives to driving solo. A key learning was that significantly higher gas prices in 2008 were not enough to motivate staff out of single-occupancy vehicles, and we have to find ways to remove barriers to alternative commuting options beyond the cost of fuel. A significant challenge is the lack of robust public transit infrastructure around many of our stores.

Looking Forward

While our greatest progress in reducing GHGs associated with commuting has taken place at our largest facilities in Washington, we plan to take the lessons learned from these pilot programs and adapt them to our other facilities, including our retail stores, with the ultimate goal of reducing the barriers to getting REI staff out of single-occupancy vehicles for their commute. We commute most - if not all - of the days that we work, and there are connections between commuting and attracting and retaining employees. How our employees commute to our stores is also a reflection of how customers and members get to our stores, and we are working to understand these connections.