Land O’Lakes is betting that control beats compliance. By letting workers choose the days and times they work, the Fortune 500 food giant says its flex jobs are getting roughly 25% more applicants than traditional full-time roles. It also reports that turnover among new flex workers is 12 points lower than turnover for recently hired full-time talent.

This is not a vibe-only perk. The program started at the tail end of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2022, when Land O’Lakes assembled a small HR team to test flex work at select manufacturing and operations sites. Participants in the part-time program tell the company what times they’d like to work, and Land O’Lakes comes back with a slot that fits their schedules. Most flex workers log about 16 to 30 hours per week, with shifts built around employees’ availability rather than a fixed schedule.

The reason this matters right now is that manufacturing does not have the luxury of pretend labor markets. Land O’Lakes itself links the incentive to persistent labor shortages and elevated turnover in the manufacturing sector. Flex jobs, it argues, can attract people who otherwise cannot commit to standard work patterns. In other words: instead of asking workers to adapt to the plant, the plant adjusts to workers.

Land O’Lakes did not treat this as an HR experiment happening in a vacuum. Julie Sexton, chief human resources officer at Land O’Lakes, tells Fortune that leaders across the organization were hearing the same message: work-life balance was a key need “regardless of work, location, generation, [or] type of work-flexibility.” Sexton also describes how the retired chief supply chain officer “really came forward like: ‘Let’s challenge our notion here,’” arguing that the company had to step beyond the paradigm that flexibility “can’t happen in manufacturing environments.”

Most flex opportunities so far are concentrated in operations and supply chain roles across 60 U.S. Land O’Lakes manufacturing facilities, including shift-based work where staffing is practical but schedules are often rigid. The company plans to roll the benefit out to all 140 locations nationwide, and says there are additional flex options in housekeeping, office clerking, and sanitation. The operational punchline is staffing: Sexton says facility leaders weigh in on whether flex roles are possible at their site, since flexibility typically requires extra staffing to ensure shifts are covered.

Under the hood, this policy is doing two jobs at once. First, it aligns incentives. For workers, the program is tangible: shift choice can mean unloading trucks before sunrise, or working a sanitation shift after the kids are asleep. For Land O’Lakes, the payoff shows up in measurable recruitment and retention outcomes: 25% more applicants and 12 points lower turnover for new flex hires. Second, it forces a different kind of workforce planning, where the scheduling process becomes a coordination system rather than a one-way demand.

And yes, flex is only one piece of the broader employee-experience stack Land O’Lakes is building. The company also offers a three-day hybrid model for employees at its Minnesota headquarters, paid caregiver and emergency leave, and phased retirement plans. It is trying to make “flexibility” a coherent strategy rather than a single program, which matters because workers tend to evaluate packages as an ecosystem, not as a perk menu.

Land O’Lakes is also working on cohesion inside that ecosystem. In 2022, it rolled out a reverse mentorship program that pairs junior employees with senior employees, flipping the usual mentoring dynamic. Sexton says the program is popular with leaders because it gives them a direct line to new perspectives while boosting younger workers’ confidence and visibility. It is a nine-month program open to anyone at the company, with staffers paired intentionally across generations, and it has drawn 900 employee participants so far. This year alone, there are 130 reverse mentorship duos.

The strategic logic is the same as flex jobs, just applied to culture instead of schedules. Land O’Lakes is trying to bridge gaps across a multigenerational workforce where life realities differ. Sexton frames it as an advantage: junior employees bring “fresh perspective” that experienced employees may not always hear, and experienced employees provide knowledge and wisdom about work. For executives, the point is not that mentorship fixes everything. It is that the company is explicitly treating workforce management as multi-dimensional: how people work, how they grow, and how the organization translates those differences into performance.

If you are a CEO, CFO, or HR leader in an operating-heavy industry, Land O’Lakes is offering a rare case study with numbers attached to a seemingly simple idea: give workers schedule control, then redesign staffing around it. The second-order implication is hard to ignore. When you reduce friction in recruitment and retention, labor scarcity becomes less of a constant crisis and more of a controllable variable. Land O’Lakes is scaling from select sites to all 140 locations, which suggests it believes the tradeoff between operational complexity and labor outcomes is worth it.