Welcome back to another episode of The Industrial Movement, a show focused on the processes and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. We usually have conversations with other professionals in the industry, but today is a special solo-cast, held by hosts Morty Hodge and Greg Smith. In this episode, listeners will hear about our recent 2022 Best Workplaces in America award and advice for how to help your company win it in the future. We delve into some details about the award, what it takes to become eligible, and the benefits of winning. We explain the importance of creating a company culture and vision, cost-effective ways of maintaining company culture, core values and goals which should form part of any company, how to recruit and work with top talent, the benefits of paying your employees well, and more! Don't miss out on this special episode of The Industrial Movement where you can learn tips and tricks to help your company win the 2023 Best Workplaces in America award.
Welcome back to another episode of The Industrial Movement, a show focused on the processes and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. We usually have conversations with other professionals in the industry, but today is a special solo-cast, held by hosts Morty Hodge and Greg Smith. In this episode, listeners will hear about our recent 2022 Best Workplaces in America award and advice for how to help your company win it in the future. We delve into some details about the award, what it takes to become eligible, and the benefits of winning. We explain the importance of creating a company culture and vision, cost-effective ways of maintaining company culture, core values and goals which should form part of any company, how to recruit and work with top talent, the benefits of paying your employees well, and more! Don't miss out on this special episode of The Industrial Movement where you can learn tips and tricks to help your company win the 2023 Best Workplaces in America award.
EPISODE 24
[INTRODUCTION]
[00:00:02] MH: You're listening to The Industrial Movement, where we discuss the people, the processes, and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. If this is your first time listening, then thanks for coming. The Industrial Movement podcast is produced every week for your enjoyment, and the show notes can be found at our website at www.theindustrialmovement.com.
Come back often and feel free to add this podcast to your favorite RSS feed or iTunes. You can also follow the show on Twitter @theindustrialmovement, or on our Facebook page. All links to our social media can be found in the show notes, and also at the bottom of our website.
Now, let's get on to the show.
[INTERVIEW]
[00:00:40] MH: Hi, folks. Welcome to The Industrial Movement. My name is Morty Hodge, your show host. With me as always, my trusty sidekick, Greg Smith.
[00:00:47] GS: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the show.
[00:00:49] MH: Today's going to be a little bit different. We're going to do a solo cast, which we've done one in the past about Henry Ford. This one's going to be about us. But most importantly, this big award, national award that we just won, that we feel by giving you some tips and tricks of how we won this award, we feel that manufacturing leaders out there will really benefit in helping bolster their culture for a reasonable price, and to help with the hiring process and start to recruit and become a talent beacon for the talent out there that it's available, which is a little bit tough right now.
So first of all, let me explain to you the relationship between the company that won the award, which is Atlanta Compressor, and The Industrial Movement. Atlanta Compressor is a company that Greg and I started many years ago. That company provides peace of mind to manufacturing and other industrial companies by supplying and maintaining production equipment, critical equipment. We understand that manufacturing is critical to a strong American economy and we take that responsibility to help keep these plants running.
We take that very seriously. We sell in-service industrial equipment, compressed air systems and vacuum systems, and our customers rely on them, it's a lifeblood to their process. Without compressed air, the entire plants and facilities that we work in would be shut down or, at best run, at a reduced capacity. So, we own Atlanta Compressor, and we started the industrial movement as we started to get into manufacturing, because now we manufacture our own product. And also, our customers are manufacturers. So, we're looking to connect these leaders, and to create a community of manufacturing leaders that can share tips and tricks and help each other out.
Because we've won this award, we feel it's our contribution to the show, to share how we want it and why we want it and what the award is. So, I'll start off with what the award is. The award is 2022 Best Workplaces in America, and this award is given out by Inc. Magazine. Inc. Magazine is one of the largest entrepreneurial and business magazines that is widely available across the world. I've been a subscriber of Inc. Magazine for about a decade and they do a really good job of talking about a bunch of different industries and highlighting businesses. Some included are manufacturers, and they're known for this list every year, which is Best Workplaces in America. It's extremely difficult to go through the process and Greg will talk a little bit more about that later on. But this list really is a who's who of creating great workplace cultures that actually are effective, and their team members will agree that that is the case.
After COVID in 2020, and going into 2021, we all know that this completely changed the workplace. Some people refer to it as the new normal, because I don't think we're going back to the way it was. That's my personal opinion. We don't know what the future holds. But I think we've been – COVID really permanently changed the way we look at business and how we're going to have to look at dealing with team members and employees, moving forward. Existing team members and future team members. It's really going to change the way we recruit these people, we train and develop these people, and we hold these people accountable, what we pay them, the benefits we offer. All of that has had to change and good businesses understand this. They accept this and they start to adapt.
So, Greg, tell us a little bit about Quantum Workplace and the process we had to go through to be verified and ultimately win this award.
[00:04:54] GS: Alright, Quantum Workplace is a third-party independent company that is used by many companies to dig into any company that wants to be a part of this. It's not an easy process. It's rather invasive to any company. They come in, they want to look at financials, they want to look at pay scales, they interview all of your team members, doing their surveys you have to fill out. There's no BS in your way through this. It's going to be legit and the companies that make this list deserve it 100%, because it's very, very thorough and they look at everything and anything about your company, especially the culture. Greg Harris is the CEO of that and one of the one of his quotes is, “Organizations that haven't seen a feedback loop to understand the voice of an employee, and that are managing human capital with an emphasis on human are winning”, and that's kind of companies that make this list.
[00:05:51] MH: Yeah, ultimately, that's it right? This is about people, and the Quantum Workplace verifies all the results, and this is not a list that you can BS your way on. It's something that you have to earn your way on and it's hard work. I think a lot of manufacturers don't want to invest in their culture, because they see dollar signs, right? They don't want to spend the money, they think it's going to cost them money, and that's going to affect the bottom line. What I want to stress today is talked to you a little bit about how we created this culture, but most importantly, we created it on the cheap.
So, how did Atlanta Compressor win the 2022 Best Workplaces in America? It really starts with culture and the foundation of our culture is based around our vision, and what our vision is to us is it's an infographic that is all over our building. All of our team members know what it is. And it's three parts. The vision consists of our purpose, our core values, and our mission that we're currently on.
Now, our purpose is to provide peace of mind. We know that statement is short, cliché and sweet, but it means a lot to us. It means that we provide peace of mind to our customers by taking what we do very serious, and understanding that we provide critical production equipment. When our equipment fails, or is not reliable, it severely impacts our customer. So, our goal is to provide those customer’s peace of mind. But it's more than that. It's providing peace of mind to our team members by being good leaders of our company, and doing the right thing, by creating this vision, and keeping all of our team members engaged. We provide peace of mind to our country by realizing that it's very important for us to pay taxes. Of course, we do what every company does, and try to limit our tax liability. But we don't complain about paying taxes. We realize that it's our civic and our patriotic duty to pay taxes for our military, roads, infrastructure, you name it. We get it.
So, that's one way we provide peace of mind is to pay our taxes willingly. We provide peace of mind to our community by creating these great paying jobs for more great people. We constantly scale, we constantly expand, and we're creating jobs for our community. On top of that, we focus on giving back to our community. We're constantly doing community events, sponsoring different schools, or organizations in our community, and even helping out, going as far as helping out individuals financially or however we can support them.
We provide peace of mind to our community by doing that. We provide peace of mind to our vendors, because we pay our bills on time. We know that fast payments make fast friends, and that's one of the ways we can provide peace of mind to them. So, it expands way beyond our customers. It goes to our team members, to our partners, to our community and to our government. We realize that being a good business, and focusing on a great culture is really the foundation of how we win an award like this.
Greg, talks us through our core values, which is the second component to our vision.
[00:09:13] GS: Yeah, just like Morty was talking about. Our purpose is our why. Why do we do this? Why do we come to work every day? And then our core values are how we're going to go about doing business? So, the first one – we have 10 and that might seem like a lot but all have these means something to us and each person that works for us. Culture is the key to our success. The first one. I don't know who said it, but it's known. You can have the best strategy in the world, but culture eats strategy for breakfast.
So, if you don't have the right people, and they don't want to be there, and they're not A players, strategy doesn't mean anything. And then the second one is that we practice extreme ownership. Each and every person that comes to work for us, they have the ability to own their role with extreme ownership. They got this, this is my yard, if you will, and they're going to own that and be darned if anybody else is going to have to help them get their job done. And then the third one is we are resourceful and find a way. Every person here is extremely resourceful. They're going to be hard pressed to make that phone call when they just tried everything. That's the last thing they want to do. They're going to find a way to get the job done and there's so many resources out there.
The fourth, we believe optimism and positivity breeds opportunity. We're a business. We have jobs that go sideways. We have issues just like any other business. We choose to handle them in a positive way and be optimistic and know that when something goes wrong, and we make a mistake, it's an opportunity to get better and learn.
The next one is we do what we say we'll do. Kind of lose on our code. If we're not doing that, we probably shouldn't be doing business, and then next is we hold each other accountable. You can have an amazing culture with A players, but it has to be a culture of accountability as well. All the A players want to be held accountable, and they want to know everybody else is being held accountable. And that the person next to them is doing their job. We come from a center of caring. If you don't have the ability to care, you don't work for us. Everything we do is from a center of caring. We're servant leaders. We will help anyone in anytime.
My personal favorite is we laugh and we have fun. Like I said before, we're a business and we have issues and we make mistakes, and we have bad days from time to time. We just choose to deal with it. Sometimes we get a laugh at ourselves and learn from the mistakes and move on. And then leaders or readers. Our next one is we learn and grow every day. We want every person that ever comes to work for us, no matter how long they stay to be better versions of themselves, whatever that means, whether it's financially or personally or in any aspect of your life.
The last one, gratitude changes everything. We were at a seminar one time and there’s a speaker and he was saying that he's like, “I've done those studies”, and he's like, “Your body, your brain will not allow you to feel anxiety or fear while you're feeling gratitude.” It's just chemically impossible. So, if you can master the ability to be grateful on a daily basis and make it a routine, you'll be so much happier as a person. Obviously, our purpose is our why. Our values are how we want to go about doing business. And then the third part is the mission that we're currently on what we're trying to achieve.
So, our mission is not like a mission statement. It's what we're trying to – we do a five-year mission. We call it a BHAG, big, hairy, audacious goal. If it doesn't make you feel a little queasy inside, it’s probably not big enough. So, that's what we're on now. We started we finished our first mission up in 2019, for this five-year mission. And in that that year, we sat down as a team, collectively, and came up with the next five-year mission through 2024 and that's what we're on currently.
[00:13:02] MH: There's a famous quote out there that says, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you'll land among the stars.” And that's how we feel about our goals that we set, which is our mission. A lot of people wonder, “Okay, that's great. You set that up, you set that foundation. Well, what about the ongoing maintenance of your culture?” That's a good question. It's a good concern, because let's face it, the bottom line is we don't – while we want to invest in our culture, a lot of companies out there don't have the budget to just constantly pour money into meals and parties and trips and stuff like that. It can be done in a cost-effective manner, and it really starts with, in my opinion, genuine care.
Effective one-on-one meetings is really the first line of defense we have to maintain in our culture. Anytime we feel the culture slipping or we think that we lost a key person, and we're concerned about some negativity being spread through the company. Listen, that happens to every company. We understand that the first line of defense for us is the one-on-one meetings. Sitting down with each team member on a consistent basis, and spending the first half the meeting talking about performance. But then most importantly, the second half of the meeting is about them. It's their agenda. Things that they want to talk about. Any frustrations they have.
We found out that that's one of the best ways to nip any problem in the bud and stop things from festering, is to have this regular meeting rhythm of one-on-one meetings with every team member. We do that about once every two weeks. Sometimes we slack on that and it goes a little bit longer. The worst culprit of that, not always maintaining that meeting rhythm, but Greg's not. Greg stays on top of it and he's probably the best in our company, and so all the team members that work with Greg, consistently have a one-on-one meeting probably weekly. So, he's pretty good at staying on top of the pulse of his team. Like I said, those meetings can last 10 minutes to 20 minutes. They don't have to be a long time. But they do have to be very intentional. This is not an ongoing meeting or a touching base throughout the day. This is time set aside specifically for you and your team member to sit down and talk about their job, their role, what's going on in their life, and a little bit about their performance.
Next is we do have some parties, but we really only have one main party throughout the year, and it's our Christmas party. We do it after hours. We have a catered. It's not very expensive. I think most companies do have a Christmas party. Ours is a lot more fun than most peoples’, I would imagine. We spent a lot of time preparing games. Last year I dressed up as Santa Claus, and, Greg, I don't know if you know that. But that actually was me. It wasn't the real Santa Claus, it was actually me.
[00:15:56] GS: Son of a gun, I had no idea.
[00:16:00] MH: It was. I let the cat out of the bag there. And then we truly value everyone's input. We don't just say that Greg's going to talk a little bit more about how we go about valuing people's input, and how we expect them to be part of the solution. But like I said, the ongoing maintenance really starts with genuine care. You can't BS genuine care. You have to be authentic about it. If you're a leader, and you don't have the ability to practice empathy, and you don't have the ability to care about your team members, genuinely, I would strongly encourage you to figure it out.
I'll be honest with you, that is something that you can learn. I naturally did not have that ability to practice empathy and I was able to be self-taught investing in resources, books, and learning and focusing on practicing empathy. Now, I would consider myself a very empathetic leader, sometimes too empathetic. Sometimes folks mistake my kindness for weakness, and we have to make sure that we're going back to the accountability side of the business, to make sure we get the results that we need.
Greg, walk us through our strategic process, and specifically how that's one of the main ways we get everyone's feedback to make sure everyone's heard.
[00:17:24] GS: Absolutely. So, we call it strategic planning. We do it every quarter and we get together our entire team. Even if that means we have to shut down for a couple hours, to get together, to get everyone's input, and we do an entire team SWOT exercise. So, what that means is, is we literally put papers on the wall, and our leaders sat there with markers and they write down everyone's answers, and there's no wrong answers or right answers. It's just how they feel.
So, the SWOT stands for strengths and weaknesses, those are internal to our company, what are we good at? What do we suck at? And then OT is opportunities and threats. What are opportunities and threats outside of our company that we are taking advantage of, or we need to be prepared for? And then there's usually another part of it, where we start out with lessons learned. What do we learn from the previous quarter? And what was our accomplishments? What did we do great? What did we get better at?
So, we take all this data that everybody has input on, and then we sit down and we come up with strategic issues. It's not just a list of problems, there's a specific way to articulate those. Just for an example, given our lack of funds, how do we grow our marketing budget? Or how do we increase our marketing budget? That would be a way of phrasing that and there's a very good reason for that, because it has – part of the solving a problem, there was a quote, it says, “A problem well stated, is a problem half solved.” So, there's a reason for that.
Then we take three to five of those strategic issues, and we create quarterly priorities. And then we have, usually one of our leaders is a champion of that priority, and throughout the next 13 weeks, there's SMARTs, which are the tasks throughout that.
[00:19:13] MH: Greg, what does SMART stand for?
[00:19:16] GS: It's specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. It's an acronym. There's a specific way you set up the quarterly priorities. You start with the end in mind, the evidence of success, one to five things. There's no right or wrong number of evidences of success. At the end of this 13 weeks, these things are going to let us know if we achieved this and accomplished this and fixed this problem. Or it might not always be a problem. The priority doesn't always have to be a problem. It can be an opportunity, so you might see an opportunity, we need to figure out how we're going to take advantage of that. So, it could be a positive thing too, and then you create the SMARTs, those are all the tasks that have to be done throughout that quarter. At the end, that you've hopefully fixed the strategic issues that you were working on. I mean, as we found, throughout time doing these, is a lot of times it doesn't fix the problem, or we just didn't quite get all the way to where we needed to be. But we never give up. We've had the same priority or same strategic issue on many times, because we just keep trying to fix it. Or we grow so much that now that what we fix doesn't work anymore and now we got to fix it again.
[00:20:30] MH: Or we suck at fixing and we fall flat in our face.
[00:20:33] GS: Yeah. But the bottom line is, is you got to keep doing it. You're not going to fix every single problem perfect every time, you're just not. And you're always going to have problems and issues. So, that's the key, is to keep doing it, keep getting your team's input, fix the things that they care about too, or most, or sometimes they get to point out things that we didn't even see, as leaders, it's very, very important.
[00:20:55] MH: I think that employees don't expect perfection, but they do want to see progress. And the fact that we fail sometimes, but we never give up. I think they see that and they respect that and that's really half the battle.
The next thing I want to talk about is the Inc. Magazine article online, the heading that their staff wrote is, “How great companies are making work, work? Some companies haven't felt the effects of the Great Resignation. And here's what makes them different.” Folks, I can't stress to you enough that is exactly the phrase. Atlanta Compressor does not have an issue recruiting top talent. We don't in our Nashville branch, our Charlotte branch, our Greenville branch, we don't have a problem, recruiting talent. Now, how and why? That's what I want to share with you. These are things that you can put into place.
The first thing is the vision. Having that vision, which was the purpose, the core values, and the mission is exciting. You print it out, you put it on the wall, it's tangible to them, and people want to work with a company that has a vision, that's exciting. That's doing the right thing, and really speaks to them on an emotional level, and that's genuinely with no BS, that's genuinely what a vision does.
Secondly, we are really good at marketing and if you're good at marketing to potential customers, you should be good at marketing to potential team members. I would encourage you to get your marketing department or a marketing team that you may work with, involved in helping you create some ideas and campaigns for hiring. That's exactly what we've done. We've focused and looked at filling up the candidate pipeline, if you will, with as many candidates as possible, so we can have our pick of the litter. How we do that as we focus on the marketing aspect of the job post.
The job posting is really the first step, you have to culture-fi your job posting. And I would encourage you to go out there and to indeed.com, which is the website, we use the majority of the time for recruiting and look up Atlanta Compressor and look at some of our job posts and how they're written. You know what, to anybody listening to the show, I give you free permission to copy and paste it and edit it for your use. I don't mind. I'm not going to – it's not copyrighted. I'm not going to squeal about it. And if I can help you hire people easier and better and get better talent, we are so happy to do that.
Once you get that in the system, or once you get that out there and you start getting candidates responding to you, have a good hiring process. We were taught to call them a gauntlet. We want to give them a written exam, we want to have 10-minute chat with them to have a phone screening with them to see if they sound crazy, to see what they sound like. We like to get the pay question out of the way early and often. So, we don't waste their time or waste our time to make sure that we can afford them and they're a good fit.
And then ultimately, we bring them in for face-to-face review and that's to hone in on, mostly, if they’re a culture fit for our team. Skill set to us as last. We can teach skill set but you can't teach character and you can't teach culture fit. Either they do or they don't. So, if you hire for your culture, then you train those people up keeping your core values and your culture in mind, ultimately, you use the same guide to fire people if they don't work out and that makes it easier. It makes it black and white. It makes it not you, it's the culture. Right? It doesn't make it personal when you have to let somebody go, and we encourage everybody to hire slow and fire fast. You do not want to keep people around that are a bad influence and have poor work ethic. You definitely don't.
Let’s see here, what else can I talk about? The vision for us really turns into a talent beacon and it's kind of the thing that closes the deal. So, once you've gone through, you've run a candidate through your hiring gauntlets, and once again, if you want to know more about the hiring gauntlet, I can't cover everything in this podcast episode. But reach out to me on LinkedIn. I'm happy to coach anybody out there on the hiring process we use and how we go about recruiting top talent. Once again, I'll stop talking about it now. But I can't stress to you, we do not and have never had an issue hiring people. So, whatever we're doing, it works. I hear every company, 100% of companies out there complaining about trying to find top talent. While I empathize with you, I can't relate because we've never had that issue.
Greg, talk to us a little bit about accountability, and why that's so important in our culture.
[00:25:56] GS: Yeah, accountability. So, we only hire A players. And A players want to work with other A players. The only way that A players like to achieve goals, they like to be held accountable to high standards, and they want to know that everybody else they work with is the same way. And then we also hold each other accountable public. We have public accountability, that allows the entire team to see that everyone else is pulling their weight. We have a meeting every Monday morning. Our morning huddles that we do, also the culture building that we do. Every morning for 10 to 15 minutes before the day starts, and every Monday we go, everybody reports their public accountability themselves, and then we review it every Monday morning. We call it the big three. It's the biggest three things that are most important to their job role and our mission that we're currently on. We go over and it also gives them – if they did fall short, for whatever reason, it gives them an opportunity to explain it and let everyone else understand why. And they're like, “Okay. Alight.” And it's about consistency too. When you report publicly, it increases productivity big time. You have to measure results to start improving those results. If you do it in a public way, that's magnified.
[00:27:16] MH: Another thing we want to talk about is trust. We have a high trust environment. We have total transparency, where all of our team members can feel like themselves and truly be themselves. We genuinely care for one another and we enjoy this high level of mutual respect that's created. Trust is one of those things where we all know and heard the phrase, or have a feeling that you have to earn my trust. Well, if you're in a company, and you're making every team member that comes aboard or “earn your trust”, it's going to take a long time. And what happens is, if it takes too long to earn that person's trust, it might be too late.
So, what we do, and how we look at that is everybody that comes into our team automatically has our trust. And by trusting them, they begin to trust us a lot faster. And once we can develop that relationship, build that rapport based on trust, it makes the working environment and accountability a lot easier, and we can do that a lot faster than most companies.
The downside to that is of course, we've gotten burned a few times, right? We extended that trust, and somebody took advantage of that trust. But you know what, it's okay. I would much rather have that scenario where we constantly and consistently offer that trust first, and get burned a few times than to make every single team member take the time, and to develop and earn our trust. That would take way too long. I feel that it would restrict and limit our potential and our growth of a company and achieving the results if we put everybody through the gauntlet of earning our trust.
The next is we have an empowering culture. Our team believes in one another. We love to live our values, and we enjoy working with each other. We laugh together, honestly, sometimes, most of the time too much. But you know what, we'd rather have it that way. I love what I do. But it's more important to me to love who I do it with.
Finally, we all know that pay is a huge factor in hiring people and all I can tell you, not every company and not every manufacturing leader is going to be able to say the same thing, and I understand. But for us in our company. We're not greedy. We're very transparent with the books. We're very transparent with exactly the performance of the company, and we believe that great team members should receive great pay and great benefits. I celebrate and I love paying more money. And then on top of that, I surprise team members with bonuses for fun competitions or activities. I think it's an opportunity for us to bless people, wonderful people on our team, by not being greedy and spreading that money around. That is a great way we earn loyalty and trust and respect from our team members, because they can clearly see that we're not greedy, and we don't hog all the money.
Finally, ultimately, in order for you to build a great culture, you have to put it on a pedestal, and it's something that you have to work for every day. It doesn't take a whole lot of money to do these things. But it does take consistency. One of our friends, Kenneth Scruggs from BMW Manufacturing, he was on the show and that's what he said. One of the best characteristics of a leader is consistency. You have to draw that line in the sand and you have to just be consistent with team members. And once they see that, they feel like it's a disciplined environment, they know what the level of expectation that you have on them, and the ones that are performers will stay and live up to those expectations and the ones that aren't, you'll weed them out of your culture, hopefully quickly. And because you have a good hiring vision, hiring those talent shouldn't be that big of an issue for you.
Once again, feel free to reach out to us. We'd be happy to share more details. We're very excited about this award. We're very proud of this award. And hopefully, this episode, you've learned a few tips and tricks that you might be able to install in your department or your company that can help you win 2023 Best Workplaces in America. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode. Have a great day.
[OUTRO]
[00:31:44] MH: Well, folks, that's it for this week's episode. Be sure to visit our website www.theindustrialmovement.com to view today's show notes and get more golden nuggets of value that we have collected from manufacturing and industrial professionals in our archived episodes.
On our website, you can also sign up for our newsletter and find links to join The Industrial Movement community on Facebook. The Industrial Movement podcast is where we discuss the people, the process, and the equipment that drives American manufacturing. I'm your host Morty Hodge, wishing you great success.
[END]