Celeste Parker: Yes, gladly. Celeste Parker. I am the Director of the Employee Benefits Department. I have been serving Costco employees in this space for 25 years.

Grace Morales: Amazing. And James?

James Narvaez: Hi. I’m James Narvaez. I am the Supervisor in the Benefits Department. I just hit my 9-year anniversary with Costco, but have been in benefits for 5 years in, like, a week.

Grace Morales: Congrats, James. And Shelby?

Shelby Arnold: My name is Shelby Arnold. I’m a Benefits Coordinator. And I’ve been with Costco for a great 3 years.

Grace Morales: Oh. Well, thank you all for being here today. We’re going to kick things off with you, Celeste. I imagine some employees might not know what the WITT pledge is or how it came to be. Can you give us a bit of WITT history?

Celeste Parker: Absolutely. It’s one of my favorite Costco stories. So WITT stands for We’re in This Together. And it originated from our previous CEO, Craig Jelinek. And it continues to flow through with our current CEO, Ron. And it is Costco’s commitment to make sure that we are offering exceptional benefits to all of our part-time and full-time employees. And what we mean by exceptional is that employees have the right care at the right time and at an affordable price.

We never want price to be the reason why our employee didn’t get the care that they needed. However, it’s not just us that plays a role in our employees’ well-being. It’s employees’ role to understand those benefits that we offer and use them wisely. However, it’s really hard for employees to understand where do I go. When do I go there? Is there a resource for this? And so we have different platforms like the Live Healthy Team, Resources for Living that employees can, of course, call.

And they will navigate them through whatever it is that they’re going through. We want to be able to proactively communicate these benefits to employees without flooding them. So we use the We’re in This Together pledge to send out monthly articles, podcasts and different components to help them better understand their benefits in a way that it flows nicely.

They’re not getting it all at once. They’re getting it in pieces that are more digestible and easy to understand. So we talk about this is how you can take care of your financial well-being. This is how you can take care of your physical well-being or maybe your emotional well-being. And at the end of each article, we explain the tools and resources that are available to you to help with that particular area.

Grace Morales: Thank you, Celeste, for that bit of WITT lore. Moving on to you, Shelby, as someone who talks to employees every day about their benefits, can you tell us what is the benefit, pun intended, of taking the pledge?

Shelby Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. Like Celeste was saying, I think the world of benefits can be pretty confusing and complex. It is to me sometimes. And I really think that we’re so lucky to have such a robust set of benefits available to us. But the thought of learning all of those benefits on your own can be really daunting, so the pledge is really a way to open access to quick and easily digestible pieces of information about those benefits to you. This way, you don’t have to know it all or really all at once.

It really takes the load off because they already know that that’s there and they have some support through their benefits. A great example is an employee that I was able to help through taking the pledge that there were benefits related to budgeting and financial planning that were available to him.

And because of that information and knowledge that he had tucked away in the back of his head, we were able to go over the more specifics and get him connected to all of the resources that got him back on track, helped him save his home, got him mental health help. He didn’t need to know the ins and outs of the benefits. He just knew that they were there. And that’s really what it’s all about.

Grace Morales: Well, I’m glad that there are people like you, Shelby, to help close the gap even further. And oh, speaking of load, James, you worked at the warehouse before joining the Benefits Department, right?

James Narvaez: Yeah, so before joining benefits about 5 years ago, I was in the warehouse for about 4 down in the LA region. I bounced around to a couple of buildings, but did things like gas carts, front end, sales, merch, that sort of thing.

Grace Morales: Why did you join the Benefits Department? What made you want to join?

James Narvaez: Oh, I mean, we could talk forever about that. But long story short, I mean, I went to school for this kind of thing. But I just like to be able to help individuals when it comes to understanding some pretty complex things. So if I can just be that person or that expert for somebody, I just really enjoy it.

Grace Morales: And with that perspective, as someone who has worked in a warehouse in different capacities, why do you think employees should take the pledge personally? What will they get out of the resources available, including managers?

James Narvaez: I think the thing to remember is managers are also employees too. So from the employee perspective, I think why taking the pledge can be so beneficial is just realizing that life exists outside of work, right? And so I think the nice thing about taking the pledge is that it’s the easiest way for you to learn about your benefits. That’s kind of what we do in the Benefits Department. I always think about my buddy who works in a building.

Since I’ve gone to the Benefits Department, I’ve kind of become that, of course, you’re going to talk about benefits to me to him. And so being able to point him to things like the WITTpledge.com, or being able to see Employee Podcasts, or even just telling him, ‘Hey, there’s going to be emails that come out every month. Even if you just get to 1 or 2 of them, it’s OK to not read every single article every month if that doesn’t work for you that particular month.’

So like Shelby mentioned in her story, when the time comes that you might need one of them, it’s somewhere in the back of your mind that it existed. And so with my friend particularly, I point him towards the podcast because then he doesn’t have to hear it from James, the guy that works in benefits. He can hear it from other people that are either in management like him, or on the front end, or in sales, or things like that.

And then from the manager perspective, I can confidently say that all the people that I’ve been able to work with, they all want to help each other. Everyone wants to be that support system for somebody. But with how fast paced work can be or just how busy life gets for everyone and themselves, it can be hard to be that when you get a 500 door count and someone’s coming up to you that’s really having a rough day.

And so what we’ve really tried to do with the pledge is we also have a manager resources page on the website, where you have Benefit Guides, Quick Reference Guides. So when an employee comes to them and is struggling, the expectation isn’t that the person in leadership knows every single detail about benefits. It’s being able to help that employee take the first right step. And I think the same goes for co-workers too, right? Because you always want to help that person who you’re in the break room having a good time with or working alongside 5 days a week.

Grace Morales: That’s right. And speaking of impact, Celeste, do you have insights on what you’ve noticed on employees who not only take the pledge, but also use WITT’s resources versus those who don’t?

Celeste Parker: Yes, we do. We actually look at that closely year after year. We’re asking employees to carve out 5 minutes to take the pledge year after year. And we’re asking leadership to support those efforts and make sure that they’re informing their employees of the importance of taking the pledge. So there’s work involved. And we want to make sure that this continues to be useful.

So when we look at the resources that we promote in a particular month, we do see an immediate uptick of utilization of that particular resource. We also look at the employees who take the pledge versus the employees that don’t take the pledge. Are they using their benefits differently? And we see that that’s actually the case. So employees who are taking the pledge, they’re getting their annual physicals, they’re getting their cancer screenings, and they’re using the resources at a higher frequency than employees that don’t take the pledge.

We see that there’s impact and value to the employees that are actually taking the pledge. We also want to make sure that this continues to be useful and meaningful to our employees. We don’t ever want to get to a place where people stop reading the stuff. We also really hone in on the feedback that we receive from employees. We have two different surveys every year: one in January, where we ask employees, what do you value about your benefits? What is something that you wish we had more support on?

What are things that you don’t understand about your benefits? And then every June, we survey the employees that took the pledge and ask: Was this information valuable? What do you wish that we talked about that we didn’t? And that’s what we use to assess what should we talk about, when should we talk about it and in what way should we talk about it? So we really do value the feedback that we get from employees. And we use that to make sure that what we’re offering is actually very useful. I think one good example of that is we have 95% of our employees are enrolled in the health care coverage.

And every single employee who has health care coverage through Costco, they get a life insurance policy for free. We pay for it, Costco. However, only 50% of those individuals actually have a life insurance beneficiary on file. So we take that information, and we crafted up an article that said, ‘Hey, are you aware that you have life insurance? This is what it means when you designate a beneficiary. And these are the impacts to your survivors when you don’t designate a beneficiary.’ So that’s an example where we are looking at data, we’re looking at feedback to make sure that these articles are very useful.

Grace Morales: And until when can employees take the survey, the one in January?

Celeste Parker: So starting January 1, when we open up the pledge for the year, we also activate the survey. And we run the survey during the entire month of January because about 90% of the employees that take the pledge, they take it during the month of January, even though the pledge is year-round.

James Narvaez: Adding to that a little bit, I think just to hit on the manager side of what Celeste is saying, that’s also what helps influence the type of information and how we deliver it to management and folks in the building that are relied on to help other people. And so one of the things I could think of is starting in 2026, we’ve pared down a lot of the communication materials that were accessible in a building.

So rather than having a bunch of different trifolds, now there’s Benefit Guides and calendars, but a limited number of trifolds, or quadfolds, or what have you. And the idea isn’t to limit access to information, but to really put it in a format that employees have asked for it or how leadership has asked for it to be structured so that it can always be up to date. So that survey and just ongoing engagement helps influence a lot of different parts of what we do.

Grace Morales: That’s awesome to hear. And, well, Shelby, do you have any personal impact from the WITT pledge in general?

Shelby Arnold: Yeah. So there’s a really fun aspect to it. And it’s the WITT recipes that come up monthly. I love sharing them with my family. And it makes things fun. And it’s kind of adventurous. There’s a bunch of fun desserts, like the lemon cheesecake cups. And we love the pasta and sausage broccoli bake. There’s also a spiced salmon, which is really delicious. But it’s just a fun way to engage your family in your benefits as well. It doesn’t have to be so serious and so benefit-oriented. But it’s just a way to let them know that everybody’s connected, whether it be through your family at home or through your Costco family. And it’s just a fun way to incorporate everybody.

Grace Morales: Well, you heard it here first. WITT can also be fun. And speaking of, what is your favorite Costco product?

Celeste Parker: All right. So I get asked this a lot. I find this to be a two-part question. There’s the practical item. And then there’s the fun item. Practical, hands down, produce and meat. You cannot beat the quality of our produce and meat. In fact, I refuse to get it anywhere else. And then fine item, blankets. The blankets we have are the best, comfiest blankets ever. And of course, they’re the cheapest. So I have probably, if I were to guess, 50 blankets in my house from Costco.

James Narvaez: I guess, I’ll go the practical route too because on the fun side of things, I just buy anything I see. From a practical perspective, I think it goes back to the building when I was in that weird shift on the front end, where you come in at 4 pm and then are working till, like, 12:30 in the morning. And so the way that I would set that up or take lunch was I would go to the food court and get 2 slices of pep and a soda. And because of the city we were in, it would come out to $5 without any change. So it was cool because I could just either bring a $5 bill or bug someone for $5. And so yeah, that’s my favorite item.

Shelby Arnold: I love the Kirkland Signature Basil Pesto. It’s fantastic as a spread on sandwiches. One of my favorites is turkey and bacon with pesto, grilled panini-style, or a grilled cheese with pesto and tomato soup. Delicious.

Grace Morales: Well, I’m going to add all these to my shopping list for the next week. Thank you, Celeste, James and Shelby so much for your time and also for all you do for Costco employees. And thanks to those who listened in. Until next time, remember, take the WITT pledge And also, We’re in This Together.