Home Depot requires corporate employees to trade in stores

• Home Depot now requires corporate employees to spend one day each quarter working in a retail store.
• The move revives a long-standing practice that was suspended during the pandemic.
• Software developers on social media have reacted particularly favorably to the move.

The next orange-aproned employee helping you match a paint sample at Home Depot might spend their regular work days programming hex code colors for the retailer’s app.

Beginning in the fourth quarter of this year, Home Depot will require corporate employees to spend one day each quarter working in a retail store to better understand what the customer-facing roles entail.

“It’s critical that we all spend time in the aisles, interacting directly with customers and understanding the unique opportunities and challenges our frontline associates face every day,” a Home Depot spokesperson told Business Insider. “We have had many similar programs in the past, and this newly launched effort is the latest such program.”

The policy applies to corporate employees, including senior management and remote workers. According to a memo from CEO Ted Decker, employees must work an eight-hour shift four times a year, Bloomberg reported.

The spokesman said the move revives a long-standing practice suspended during the pandemic as safety concerns and operational challenges took precedence.

Software developers on social media have reacted favorably to the move, saying it would give programmers a better understanding of how real, rather than imaginary, users interact with the apps and software they build.

“More firms should give their developers systematic exposure to the business end,” programmer Eric S. Raymond POSTED on X in response to the news.

Home Depot isn’t the only company using the undercover boss strategy.

Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi made headlines last year when he revealed his takeaways from running the service a year earlier.

“It showed me, literally, that we as a company culturally focused a lot on the rider and the product that he’s eating because we’ve used them ourselves – we’ve been proud of it all time,” he said at a conference hosted by General. Electric. “But we wouldn’t be proud of the driver product because very few of us drove.”

If you are a Home Depot worker who would like to share your perspective, please do contact Dominick by email or text/call/signal at 646.768.4750. Responses will be kept confidential, and Business Insider strongly recommends using a personal email and non-work device when contacting