A Culture Where People Feel Welcome from Day One

Walk into our facility for the first time, and we want one thing to become clear quickly: there's a place for you on the team.

Our culture is built around people working together, sharing what they know and making room for different experiences and perspectives. Sometimes that starts with something as simple as saying hello.

Dave V. remembers noticing this almost immediately after joining our team. “I felt it my second day here,” Dave said. “People started talking to me right away. They were very open and, ‘Hey, welcome to the area.’ It’s a whole different experience.”

That sense of welcome is about more than friendliness. It helps create an environment where people are comfortable asking questions and contributing ideas.

A Team That Makes Room for People

Manufacturing is team-driven work. Every project depends on people with different skills and responsibilities working together. Knowledge moves from one person to another, problems get solved through collaboration and experienced team members teach what they know while continuing to learn themselves.

That requires an environment where people feel comfortable participating.

As Dave explains, teaching is simply part of the mindset. “There’s always a new guy coming in, so we always have that mindset of teaching,” he said.

New team members aren't expected to stand on the sidelines. People answer questions, explain processes and help one another find their footing. Those relationships extend across departments and, often, beyond the workday.

It's how individual experience becomes shared knowledge and how people become part of the team.

Welcoming New Ideas

Making room for people also means making room for what they bring with them.

Every person who joins our team brings a different background and perspective. They may have used another process, worked with different technology or solved a similar challenge in another way.

We want those perspectives in the conversation. “Everybody’s opinion matters,” Dave said. “The only wrong thing is to not voice your opinion and not question something.”

Sometimes there's a reason behind the way something is done, and asking the question creates an opportunity to share that knowledge. Other times, a fresh set of eyes sees something the rest of us don't.

There may be another way to approach the work, an opportunity to improve a process or an idea we haven't considered before.

When that happens, we need to be willing to listen. As Dave put it, “Bring it on. Let’s try it your way because there’s always something to learn, and we always want to improve the process.”

Culture and Continuous Improvement Go Together

Continuous improvement is often associated with processes, systems, equipment and data, but people make improvement possible.

It takes trust to ask why and openness to offer a different idea. It takes experience to teach what you know and humility to recognize when someone else has something to teach you. 

That's why the welcoming side of our culture and our commitment to operational excellence aren't separate ideas. They're connected.

When people feel like part of the team, they're more comfortable contributing. When different perspectives are heard, we create more opportunities to improve and when people openly share what they know, individual experience becomes team knowledge.

As someone new walks through our doors, welcoming them is only the beginning. We want people to belong here, contribute here and have the opportunity to grow here.

The stronger our people become together, the stronger our entire operation becomes.