Walmart is Changing the Way Its Employees Get to Work

In the spring of 2022, Walmart Inc. created a new position among the roughly 15,000 employees who work at its headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas. The job, called director of workplace mobility, comes with a very specific task: Figure out how to get 10% of the retailer’s local workforce to commute by any means other than driving alone.

Walmart originally set the target in the summer of 2019, a couple months after unveiling plans for a new 350-acre corporate campus. The goal was to get 10% of the Bentonville staff commuting on bikes by 2023, but reaching that mark has proven tougher than expected. So last year the company pushed the deadline back to 2025, when the new campus is set to open, and hired Kourtney Barrett to help hit it.

Barrett, 42, an entrepreneur and avid mountain biker who formerly led Bentonville’s chamber of commerce, has been asked to change Walmart’s home office from a workplace where the default mode is driving to one where thousands of employees choose active or public transit on a daily basis. “We’re building something from the ground up,” she says.

When Walmart reset its deadline, it also broadened the terms to include walking, riding a scooter, busing, carpooling or taking any other form of transit that isn’t a single-occupancy automobile. To count toward the 10%, an employee must use alternative modes two or three times a week for a year. Less than 1% of the Bentonville workforce currently meets that standard, according to the company.