As I talk with more and more leading pallet companies, one trend has recently emerged. They all seem to be moving toward using employee engagement and/or customer service surveys to measure progress on company goals. Some of the most successful companies on the planet use surveys as a way to benchmark success. Last year at an industry meeting, a former consultant for Chick-Fil-A spoke on how the chicken giant used employee engagement metrics to improve organizational culture.
While having lunch with Howe Wallace, CEO of PalletOne, he talked about the importance of employee surveys to measure company progress. This was recently covered in the November cover story on PalletOne, the largest pallet manufacturer in the United States. When you run a company the size of PalletOne, you need some tools to get inside the heads of team members. The same can be true though even for small operations.
At PalletOne, the company has tied its annual employee engagement and experience survey in with its human resources paperwork that all employees have to complete. Wallace said, that as a result, they have a very high success rate. Employees complete a basic survey of 12 questions aimed at identifying the current health of the company’s culture. While the individual responses are anonymous, the results are made public to all employees. These results are benchmarked across the company and compared with results from previous years. Wallace said that this survey identifies ways that the company and its management can improve.
When I attended this year’s Kingdom Business Workshop at L&R Pallet in Denver, a number of companies talked about using surveys to take the pulse of their workforce. Frank Hyatt, executive director of chaplain ministries and human resources for Millwood Inc., spoke about how the right survey tool has made all the difference for Millwood.
Millwood has 26 locations with 1,600 team members. Currently the company employs 19 chaplains and five regional chaplain coordinators to help oversee the personal progress of employees. Chaplains conduct weekly visits to plants, offer a 24/7 assistance phone line, provide counseling, will do hospital visits and perform other team member care. Millwood thought it was doing really well and discovered that there were some areas that needed improvement after conducting extensive employee engagement surveys.
The company uses a survey tool by Emplify (https://emplify.com/) to monitor employee’s perception of Millwood’s culture. Individual responses are confidential and not disclosed to company management to encourage honesty. The survey is conducted via smartphones three times per year and is offered in English and Spanish. Currently, the company gets about 75% of its workforce to respond after doing extensive internal PR for the effort.
Hyatt admitted, “We were blown away by the results. We didn’t do as well as we thought. Some people weren’t happy.” Hyatt even admitted that one department he was responsible for got the worst engagement score, and another got the best.
Hyatt explained, “I was burning out my team. I was doing it all.” People were not pleased with me.” But the survey tool helped quantify what areas need more focus and how things could be improved. Taking such an assessment requires courage from company leadership. You have to be willing to hear tough things.
Hyatt commented, “You get really nervous if you are in leadership because everybody in corporate management can see the survey results. But it empowers us to learn what we have to do to get our team members engaged.”
The company was doing a lot of good through its Millwood Cares initiatives. But most of that was coming from the top down instead of the bottom up. The company invested more in human resources and staff to take care of team members and really listen to what they had to say at the production level.
Some managers who were being burnt out got more help and people with the right skillset to take the employee care efforts to the next level. As a result, employee engagement scores are increasing. The company is getting more buy-in and involvement from the production workers. Problems are being fixed and culture may be as healthy as it has ever been.
Hyatt recalled, “We were doing all this stuff with Millwood Cares and think we are hitting it out of the park, but we weren’t connecting. Our team wasn’t connected to the vision of Millwood.”
Survey tools are critical to identify what needs to be fixed and where the company culture really is. Otherwise, you may deceive yourself into thinking everything is fine when some glaring areas need work.
Speaking of surveys, our staff every few years conducts the most in-depth human resources and labor survey of the U.S. pallet industry. This resource has become invaluable to companies wanting to benchmark their current practices with those of other pallet and lumber companies across the country. The only way you can get a copy of the survey is to participate or to buy it for $595. It will take you less than 30 minutes to complete and is a great benefit to participants and the industry as a whole.
Labor is the number one issue right now in the industry, and this is one of the best analytical tools to determine how you compare and what you can do better. Our staff goes to great lengths to make this valuable for participants even though we don’t really make money from this effort. All responses are kept confidential and will only be released to the public in an aggregate form where individual responses are not decipherable.
Do yourself a favor and participant; you will be glad that you did. The last time we did this survey was 2016, and we had more than 150 participants. Please complete the survey as soon as possible. A copy of the survey can be found on page 42. It can also be completed online at www.palletenterprise.com/2019hrsurvey.
