Dog-Friendly Office Project Training 1: Introduction to Staff Dog Training at free stitch

In the spirit of ‘Enriching the Workplace with Your Dog' at free stitch, we started the ‘Dog-Friendly Office Project’ in September 2019. 

At free stitch, we are always brainstorming new ways to develop our ever-popular Dog-friendly Office Project movement - with the simple goal of creating an office environment where people can enjoy working alongside their pets and improve their overall quality of life. 

However, bringing your pet into a business environment is not without its challenges. Some dogs can be too excitable around their owners, whereas some other dogs may not get on so well with other people or dogs. 

To help improve the situation for those dogs who are not experienced at settling in a place of business, we decided to start in-house training courses. 

In this blog, we would like to introduce the reasoning and concept behind starting our in-house training however, in the future, we will post further updates that will go into further details of our training.

We mentioned in our previous posts that we created a consent form and guidelines for employees to sign before they bringing their pets to work. In the ‘Guidelines for Bringing Pets to Work’, we mentioned that all pets who come to the office ‘must have received basic training…’. It is difficult to clearly define what constitutes ‘basic training’ as this will vary from person to person and dog to dog, but at free stitch our basic rule is that pets coming to the office should not create any obstacles for normal business operation. From the owner’s perspective, if there are any issues with pet behaviour at home, there may also be issues that occur at work. We are open-minded about pet behaviour so we try to avoid telling our employees not to bring their pets to work if they are encountering problems at home with their dog; instead, we try to promote further training. 

At the office, free stitch staff carry out a training assessment once a year to check how disciplined our pets are and what criteria we need to look at when allowing dogs into the office. At that time, we check each dog and identify what needs to be done to continue to allow the dog to come in and, if necessary, limit where the dog can be in the workplace (e.g. stay at the owner’s feet, be in a playpen, etc). At the time of the assessment, we suggest what training needs to be done to allow the dog to have more free roam around our office (e.g. toilet training, noise control, etc).       

In our next series of posts, we are going to introduce what kind of training methods we will use and which of the free stitch dogs have improved as a result of our training sessions. 

For more information on the Dog-Friendly Office Project, please click here.

Check out the Dog-friendly Office Project on SNS