Senior Manager, Employee Relations

Who We Are

The Farmer’s Dog was born from a mission to change the landscape of pet health, providing dogs and their humans with honest, smart, and simple care. We’re starting by radically improving the $90 billion pet food industry, replacing bags of highly-processed pellets with a personalized subscription service that sends complete and balanced, freshly-made dog food directly to customers’ doors. Our ultimate goal is to create innovative, delightful and personalized experiences across all aspects of pet care, and we believe our direct-to-consumer business model, holistic approach to growth, and dynamic culture uniquely position us to shepherd this backwards industry into the future.

To date, The Farmer’s Dog has delivered over 1 billion meals nationwide and raised over $150M in funding to help us build a company as healthy as the dogs who are eating those meals. Join us as we continue to develop ways of bringing peace of mind to customers, health to their companions, and much-needed change to the way people feed and care for their pets.

#LongLiveDogs

What We Stand For and Where You'll Come In

As the Employee Relations Lead, you’ll lead the charge in establishing our inaugural  Employee Relations (ER) Center of Excellence. Partnering with Humans Business Partners, our Legal team, and leadership, you’ll shape and scale our ER approach across both HQ (salaried) and Customer Experience (hourly, 24/7) populations. This role demands a sharp, nuanced first principles approach that enhances all employee experiences.

This isn’t just about ticking boxes or being compliant——it’s about creating a COE that reinforces our culture of trust, kindness, respect, and growth while building the best experience of our employees’ careers. This role offers a unique opportunity to shape the future of employee relations at our company. If you’re excited about the challenge of building a Center of Excellence that will have a lasting impact on our organization, this role is for you!
One Team: We don’t think of ourselves as “Acquisition Marketers”, “Engineers”, “Data Analysts”, or “Product Managers”. Beyond denoting skill sets and areas of expertise, we don’t think departments matter. We’d rather align ourselves to the goals we’re working to achieve and make sure we have necessary subject matter expertise to drive meaningful impact. We strive to orient ourselves around customer problems TOGETHER – getting the right people, with the right context, in the right rooms/Zooms to solve problems holistically.
We are skeptical about everything and precious about nothing: Ideas can and should come from anywhere, and we aren’t tied to our own. We proactively source input. We talk to our customers and leads regularly and are quick to change course if we know there’s a better or more impactful way to solve problems.
We consider the customer journey in all of our decisions: We know that no interaction exists in a silo and therefore understand how important every single one is. We ensure our strategy sets prospective and new customers up for success and drives long-term retention. We answer questions and address problems early and proactively. We understand the value of different channels, initiatives, and messages and know how to articulate impact and advocate for prioritization holistically.
We Execute For Impact: We don’t subscribe to “best practices” or “industry KPIs”. We’re uninterested in how we compare to “benchmarks”; instead we orient ourselves around being the best we can possibly be. Similarly, we don’t subscribe to rigid or classical expectations of roles – i.e. acquisition is hyper-focused on improving customer retention and experience.
We Are Focused and Work Without Assumption: We are not beholden to ideas. We have goals and believe everything beyond that is a series of hypotheses to validate. To that end, we seek to work in sequence and not in parallel. We constantly ask ourselves, “what’s the most important hypothesis I should be working on right now? How do I confirm or reject that hypothesis as fast as possible?”. We rarely have timelines/deadlines and are constantly taking in new information and adjusting our priorities accordingly. We don’t expect to be perfect the first time.

How You'll Make An Impact

• Build our Employee Relations Center of Excellence, assessing our current approach and creating scalable, sustainable frameworks, processes, and best practices.
• Lead with a team of engaged Humans and Legal partners to ensure a seamless, compliant approach to complex employee relations issues.
• Own employee relations cases from start to finish, driving urgency and commitment to resolving issues effectively, always with our culture and employee experience in mind.
• Conduct rigorous investigations, including interviews, e-discovery, and documentation, ensuring fair and consistent outcomes aligned to our policies and culture.
• Mediate conflicts with creativity, business acumen, and emotional intelligence, finding solutions that work for all parties involved.
• Elevate the employee experience for both salaried HQ employees and hourly Customer Experience team members by addressing concerns with compassion and in line with internal policies and local legislation. Show care, concern and investment in every conversation.
• Design, plan, and partner across Humans COEs to implement company-wide ER initiatives and training to promote a positive employee experience.
• Analyze and conceptualize complex ER issues, using your judgment and instincts to drive the best outcomes for the business and employees.
• Develop and drive policy strategy, identifying the need for new policies and enhancing existing ones, while leading collaboration with Humans Business Partners, Humans Operations, and Legal to implement them effectively across the organization.
• Apply first-principles thinking to problem-solving, navigating ambiguity to develop innovative and practical solutions.
• Partner with our People Analytics and Business Partner functions to leverage data and feedback to evolve Employee Relations as needed to enhance the employee experience. 
• Offer thoughtful insights to influence future organizational strategies.
• Build trust and credibility, serving as a cultural role model.

We're Excited About You Because

• You have 7+ years of combined and progressive HR Business Partner/Employee Relations experience 
• You have experience and passion for working with hourly employees
• You’ve built or scaled a COE and programs from scratch and are excited about the challenge of creating our ER Center of Excellence.
• You thrive as the go-to person for handling complex ER issues, with a proven track record of successful outcomes.
• You excel at partnering across functions, levels, and with key internal partners such as Humans Business Partners, Employment Counsel, and Centers of Excellence, ensuring effective communication and collaboration.
• You are skilled in investigation planning, interviewing, e-discovery, documentation, and reporting, and can get to the heart of an issue quickly and effectively.
• You maintain the highest standards of confidentiality and demonstrate impeccable judgment in all situations.
• You are a creative and business-savvy mediator, able to resolve conflicts in ways that benefit both the individual and the company.
• You manage competing priorities with clarity, focusing on work that drives the most significant impact.
• You bring strong analytical and conceptual thinking to every challenge, ensuring well-considered, high-quality decisions.
• Your passion is employee relations and the impact it has on culture, employee experience and the success of the business. 
• This role requires approximately 10% travel, with quarterly trips to New York (and Florida once the new office opens) as well as travel based on the needs of investigations. 
• You love dogs.

Office Guidelines

The office is open and available for all Monday through Friday. We ask all team members to be in office a minimum of 2 - 3 days a week to build a collaborative and invested environment to foster our unique in-person culture we are proud to have. This office policy is subject to change at company discretion.

Our DEI Philosophy:

Our company’s mission is rooted in deep, genuine care for dogs – and for the people who love them. As an organization we are full of individuals who are unique in many ways, but all united in a mission of providing true peace of mind to dog lovers everywhere. Fixing this industry and improving the lives of pets and their people will be a difficult, decades-long endeavor. We believe the best use of our time, energy, and resources as a collective team is to focus on this mission, and on supporting our team to do their best work and be their best selves. In support of this we’re committed to hiring and supporting a diverse workforce, and investing in internal structures, opportunities, hiring/promotions processes, and training that create and sustain an inclusive team. We strive to provide an experience at TFD that will be invested, meaningful and memorable as we progress on the journey to reimagine how we feed and care for our pets.

A Few of Our Best Benefits

• Dog-friendly office in Nashville
• Market-competitive compensation and equity packages
• Comprehensive Healthcare, Dental, and Vision
• Company supported mental health benefits
• 12 week paid parental leave
• Competitive 401k plan with company match
• Flexible PTO 
• Discounted fresh food for your pup
• Your pet interrupting video calls (and in-person meetings) is now a feature, not a bug

We commit to building a competitive compensation package and company environment for all individuals to thrive. We believe in competitive base compensation rooted in location specific market data and performance along with equity ownership in the company that allows every team member to build their personal wealth as the company grows, just as much as we believe in fostering a culture that supports our team members personally, professionally, and holistically. In addition to your base compensation offer you will also receive equity ownership in the company. More information about the value of this equity will be shared at the time of offer. This range is representative of NYC Market Data if you are applying to this role outside of the NYC area the range may change.

Equal Employment Opportunity Statement

The Farmer's Dog, Inc. is an equal employment opportunity employer and does not discriminate in hiring on the basis of sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, color, religion, creed, national origin, physical or mental disability, protected veteran status or any other legally protected characteristic or status. For more information, please visit Know Your Rights.