A herculean task

Digi-Key brings more than 4,000 employees back to the office in phased approach to determine what the future of work will look like for the electronics supply company; initiates controlled launch of new distribution center

By Andrew Weeks

Thief River Falls, Minnesota-based Digi-Key Electronics has a herculean task – bringing thousands of employees back into the office after working remotely for two years.

It’s a good thing the company, which ships electronics supplies all over the world, is up to the challenge. It couldn’t do it without a plan, and according to Shane Zutz, the company’s vice president of human resources, Digi-Key has a great plan.

Zutz said Digi-Key has around 5,100 employees worldwide, with most of them – about 4,400 – just in Thief River Falls. With so many employees in one location, the company has found the best way to bring employees back into the office is with a phased approach. But even so, he said, it will continue to be a hybrid work environment – one of the things the pandemic changed for many companies, no matter their size.

“We’re less concerned about where the work is done” because employees have proven “they can get the work done remotely,” Zutz said. “But what we feel we’ve lost by being fully remote, except for our distribution center, is the connection that helped our company really build on a sense of community and some of that high-level collaboration. That really just takes place when you’re in the workplace.”

Zutz said the best way the company has found to reintroduce employees to the office is in phases which it started to do earlier this year by first bringing its management team back into the office. Next, in April and May, it had employees return to the office for five days a month. In June and July it will have them come into the office for 10 days a month. Employees will rotate days so not all are in the office at the same time.

“We’re using (the phased approach) as a kind of testing ground to help us understand what our true future of work will be,” Zutz said. “We know we’re going to be hybrid, but how are we going to operate in that hybrid environment?” He said at this point there remains a lot of unknowns: “Are we going to have schedules that are static or flexible so employees can come in on the days that work best for them? Is it a combination?”

The company will be finding answers to these and other questions over the next several months.

Zutz said the company also is revamping space to make the work environment more conducive to a post-pandemic environment, and it is ramping up the services of its expanded distribution center, which was completed in April 2021.

‘Like a Bank’

Digi-Key has locations in China, Germany, Israel, Japan, Netherlands, and two in Minnesota, including Bloomington, Zutz said. It also has distribution operations across the state line in Fargo, North Dakota. But its headquarters is in Thief River Falls, the hub where most of the activity takes place.

Much of that activity is at its Product Distribution Center, which recently completed a massive expansion – some 2.2 million additional square feet of multi-story space. Formerly, the center was roughly 800,000 square feet.

Three-million square feet – that’s a lot of space.

The building, built by McShane Construction Co., is large enough to fit 22 football fields and includes shipping and receiving docks and airlocks, multiple breakrooms, employee engagement areas and site walkways to encourage fitness. A steel bridge connects the expansion to the company’s current headquarters.

“We’ve grown so exponentially that we had to design and build a new distribution system,” Zutz said, noting the facility is approaching its launch in phases.

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