Value your employees

Herb Shear, chairman, CEO and president, GENCO Supply Chain Solutions

Herb Shear, chairman, president and CEO
of GENCO Supply Chain Solutions, focuses
on his employees as much as his customers
— and for similar reasons.

“If we aren’t creating a good work environment and we lose our valued teammates,
long term, we’re not going to be profitable,”
he says.

Part of retaining employees who fit in to a
positive culture is the timeliness in which
you respond to issues.

“If we see areas where we don’t have a
good work environment for our teammates,
we don’t say, ‘Well, we’ll deal with it six
months from now,’” he says. “We deal with
it now.”

Therefore, Shear creates an environment
where people are motivated by providing
incentives to employees who do well.
However, Shear also surveys employees to
get an idea of how the majority of workers
feel about the GENCO culture.

“Most companies, when they do employee
surveys, they tend to do them once a year to
once every two years and they take a snapshot,” he says.

“We survey 9 percent of our teammates
every month for 11 months, so every team-mate does a survey. But we’re doing a large
enough random sample every month that it
gives us an opportunity to see if there is
change occurring in the work environment.
Our goal is to keep improving the work
environment so we get monthly feedback as
to how well we’re doing. We have it on an individual facility basis so we can see where
there might be places where we could do
better in providing a better work environment and also monitor the places that are
doing well.”

The survey consists of scoring each question on a scale of 1 to 6 with Shear looking
to achieve about a 4.8 or higher.

“We feel that rating, overall, we are creating a good work environment,” he says.
“Now, is everybody happy in that work environment? Probably not. But, are the majority happy in that work environment? Yes.”