Over the years the eligibility guidelines have changed. Currently Whole Foods grants stock options to all employees who have worked 6,000 hours as well as to employees for certain promotions, such as to team leader and store leader. Approximately 3,250 employees hold stock options. The percent would be much higher, Mackey notes, except for the company's rapid growth in recent years. In 1993, Whole Foods established a Section 423 stock purchase plan to enable any employee who has worked 400 hours to purchase stock at a discount through payroll deductions.
Employees also receive gain sharing bonuses based on team and store performance.
The decentralized organizational structure of Whole Foods is based on self-managing, autonomous work teams. The team structure was created when Whole Foods opened its second store. At this point, the founders asked themselves whether they wanted to have central control over everything that was happening in all of their stores. They decided it would be much better to let individual stores function autonomously and let employee teams function autonomously within the stores. They believed that this would encourage widespread innovation at all levels and that these innovations and new ideas could be shared among all teams and stores.