Finding and retaining good employees in the pallet industry has never been easy. But some companies are finding ways to improve workforce culture and create positive work environments that are difficult to leave. Learn from industry leaders that have labored to improve the culture of their businesses.
Pallet Enterprise recently interviewed the following individuals who contributed their insights on this important topic: Wesley Glidewell, HR manager for McVantage Packaging; Mac and David Grimes of Pallet Resource of North Carolina; Kevan Grinwis, president of Eido Consultants; Jeremy Janssen, HR manager for Hay Creek Pallet; and Beatrice Vasquez, founder and CFO of Oxnard Pallet Co.
What is your business doing to be more engaged with employees and provide greater communication within the company?
Wesley Glidewell: From an HR side, I find being available in their environment (going to their work areas) drives engagement far more than hoping they come to my office. Meetings and informative posters have their place, but nothing replaces going around most days and letting employees see that I am available and addressing any concerns when needed.
Mac Grimes: For a company our size (one location with 100 employees), it’s face-to-face engagement. Establish a two-way dialogue with active listening. Provide prompt feedback to employee questions, concerns and ideas. It’s a combination of structured meetings, like safety or all-hands meetings, and individual engagement by making yourself available with open door policies and plain old walking around.
Kevan Grinwis: The gift of clarity is the greatest gift any leader can provide to the people in their company. As such, many companies that I work with are seeing big success with a more intentional drive toward clarity in communication. Ambiguity creates confusion and conflict. Clarity produces organizational focus and alignment.
Practically speaking, this can include regular “state of the unions” from senior leaders, town hall style meetings, increased intentionality toward sharing “major headlines” and “cascading messages” throughout all levels of the organization.
Jeremy Janssen: At Hay Creek, we started having a monthly company meeting a little over a year ago. It is mainly a way to get information out to everyone without having to repeat it to every department head to tell their crews. One thing we do during this meeting is we ask if anyone has any comments or questions. We typically get a handful of responses about every third meeting or so.
We use our time keeping app for anonymous quarterly surveys. They are 10 questions long and then break down the responses into promoters, detractors, and neutrals and we use that to look for trends or ideas for improvement over the next few months.
We have a once a month gratitude meeting on the first Thursday. We ask if anyone has anything they want to add.
Beatrice Vasquez: We start the workday with early morning prayers, stretching and safety awareness training. Managers identify daily goals and provide direction to the team. In regard to helping employees improve their communications skill, we offer free English comprehension classes during lunch breaks. Also, we have special BBQ lunches for employee appreciation day and provide luncheons for holidays with special games and prizes.
As your company grows, how are you working to better train and onboard new employees or those who are promoted to other jobs?
Wesley Glidewell: It all starts with hiring the right person. Someone once told me that it seems like I am trying to talk candidates out of working here. I said that is exactly what I am trying to do. I want the candidate to understand the toughest parts of the job that would make most people quit. It can take a little longer to hire, but we wind up hiring fewer people, and the ones that are hired seem to enjoy what they do more.
With training, helping the employees understand the ‘why’ is key. If we can get them to realize the reason why we do things the way we do, they are more likely to follow the process.
David Grimes: I’ll answer these as one, as both questions speak to each other. I’m pleased to say we have become more engaged and built a stronger culture of cooperation over the years. It depends entirely on the people you get to execute the plan. That takes years and effort, and while you sometimes need to recruit from outside, more especially you should be developing those roles among your existing workforce. The best leaders you can get will have started out in your company swinging a hammer and pushing a broom. It’s up to management to foster the culture of professionalism and respect that elevates those people. This example shows every employee what happens if they show up to work for you with an attitude of success.
Mac Grimes: We are most successful with an initial orientation to set expectations followed by mentoring and hands-on training. As employees gain new skills and institutional knowledge and demonstrate their reliability, they are the first candidates to be promoted into key positions.
Kevan Grinwis: W. Edwards Deming said, ‘If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing.’ Bottom line, proper onboarding is done with well-crafted, people-focused processes that are duplicatable and scalable. How your company executes onboarding, training and even offboarding speaks volumes to how you value those individuals. Additionally, it can make or break employee retention and success.
I often like to remind my clients that people are not resources. They may be assets. But the difference is that resources are meant to be used. Assets, however, are meant to be invested in—providing a greater return for everyone involved.
Jeremy Janssen: We try to put a new person with someone who has been in that position for a few months to train. Training depends on the new person’s ability to learn. Sometimes it is a few hours for easier jobs, sometimes a few days for more complicated positions. We recently began trying to partner the new person with a training buddy who will stay with them until they are trained. It is pretty new so there is not a lot of feedback on it yet.
Beatrice Vasquez: We are working on newer internal training videos, supervisory hands-on training, as well as more check ins with the new and promoted employees.
How is AI and advanced analytics changing HR and personnel management in the pallet industry? What has been the biggest benefit of this technology in your opinion? Biggest drawbacks?
Wesley Glidewell: AI allows for much faster analytics and can really speed up a lot of areas, such as job descriptions. It saves a ton of time and allows me to focus on more strategic areas. The biggest drawback is that you must know what is correct and be able to spot errors. It’s like having an ambitious assistant who lacks attention to detail. They get a lot done fast, but there are going to be areas that is incomplete or needs improving. It gets you really close to the finish line. But someone who understands what is needing to be produced must review it and make changes to get the final product.
David Grimes: To handle all the disparate needs of HR, you have to familiarize yourself with several different programs and systems. They differ greatly in their user interface, complexity, and user-friendliness. Combining and analyzing data from different systems, is frequently necessary but never easy. Worse, a year doesn’t go by where at least one piece of critical software hasn’t been completely overhauled and is now unrecognizable to me. Suddenly, an important and easy to use report I built no longer works, and I’m back to late nights digging through file cabinets and spreadsheets manually compiling data until I’ve learned the new system well enough to automate it again. And here, the promise of AI continues to impress, but not always deliver.
Mac Grimes: We are in the process of automating some of the routine, week-to-week production tracking and payroll processes. The greatest benefit is more time freed up to devote to other priorities. The main drawbacks are when the automated system fails from data breaches, theft or crashes. Backups are essential.
Kevan Grinwis: AI is doing much to help businesses get more done with less. This is hugely impactful in the pallet industry, which usually is operating with razor thin margins. AI can help companies stay as lean as possible.
The biggest downside I’ve seen is that AI has the potential of de-humanizing hiring processes for companies by removing the “heart” from the review process. It can reduce everything to keywords or numbers on a page instead of a person to be considered.
Jeremy Janssen: We have tried a few AI things. In my opinion, AI could save some time in data entry and calculating. We used some cameras to count pallets, but it was in a very crowded work area with pallets going in multiple directions for different lines. We are still evaluating this technology and may deploy in the near future when either the line gets redesigned or the technology makes some more improvements.
When it comes to HR AI tools, the biggest drawback for me is having to double check everything AI does. It is too new and untested for what we need it to do. And sometimes it is just wrong. I recently asked it the width of the back seat of some cars and SUVs we are looking at purchasing. The system responded, “A: 73 inches including the outside mirrors.” AI has a little ways to go, but when it gets there it should be excellent.
Beatrice Vasquez: We are using AI to help from a legal perspective with some employee communications and creating employee-related correspondence.
The rest of the discussion continues in a future issue when these industry members discuss key metrics, unmet personnel goals, evaluating ICE enforcement impact and more.
