Episode 065: Great Place to Work Certification

Welcome to the Fleet Success Show, a podcast dedicated to talking about the fundamentals, standards, and best practices that empower today's fleets to achieve fleet success. Let's get into the show.

All right. Welcome back for another episode of the Fleet Success Show. I'm your host, Josh Turley, joined today by my co-host, Jeff Jenkins.

Hey everyone, glad to be here.

And Steve Salzgiver, how you doing?

I'm doing great. Good to be back.

All right. And today we also have our special guest returning from last week after holding down the fort, Kira Nelson. How are you doing?

I'm good. Hi everybody.

Welcome back. So today we had a fun little episode, a fun topic, something that's a little bit timely for us at RTA. It's something we've just recently gone through. But that's the Great Place to Work certification. For those who don't know, there's a company that's literally called Great Place to Work. And you can go out to this website and you can actually get certified as a great place to work. And they're, they're fairly well known. They survey a lot of companies. And you can get, you can get responses back from your employees. And they will rate you on a bunch of different categories, a bunch of different topics and go through this process with you that we're going to talk about. But in the end, they give you a kind of a result and let you know whether or not you're a great place to work. And if you're not, what you should work on instead, what kind of things you should focus on as an employer, as an organization.

How many companies out there do you think, or people that work, think that they actually work at a great place? If you had to guess.

I would say it depends on the industry.

Like 70% of people are satisfied saying they have a great place to work?

That's the threshold. Like, I know in order to get certified, you have to have at least a 70% approval, approval rating from your employees. From your employees, yes.

Do you really think it's that high, 70%?

Well, I don't know. That's why I was, that's why I was guessing. I like just reflecting. So I've worked at 7 companies total, and as I reflect back, I think only 2 of them that I was there during that time, I was like, yeah, this is a really great place to work.

Yeah. And I, but I think that's true, especially one of the things I've seen A little bit about this process, by the way, is they can benchmark you against different industries. And so you can see how you stack up against small businesses, medium businesses, top 100. And it was interesting to me as I was looking at some of the data, small businesses typically perform better than large businesses because, you know, part of it is the familiarity, the anonymity that comes When you're at a small business, you're a lot more familiar with the people. You feel more connected. When you're at a big business, you're just a cog in a machine. And so the size of the business has a huge impact on whether or not you feel like it's a great place to work.

Yeah, that personal touch and feel.

I think there's other things too. I know when I worked for Coca-Cola, we were very connected there. But I think it was brand.

Yeah.

You had like a centered, focused goal that you all—

Yeah, everybody, everybody knows who they are and you're proud to work there. And it's just, they do a lot of fun little things.

Well, and so it— and I think that's probably one of the big things is, you know, people talk about culture and what is culture and what is in it. And a lot of people get this idea in their heads as, well, I just need to throw a pool table in or a ping pong table and do popcorn and drinks and all that stuff. And that really doesn't— like, it's part of it. I think it's more of a symptom of a good culture, not something that, oh, if we just do this, that'll make us a great culture. And I think people confuse those two quite a bit.

Culture is not pizza on Fridays.

Right.

No, and it's not snacks. I mean, sure, a snack's going to fill the belly, but if you're dissatisfied with your employer or the people you work with, that's not going to make you stick around.

Right. It's like the cherry on top.

Yeah, it is.

I think I've told this story before, but when I did leave Coca-Cola, went to a movie, saw those little characters at the AMC movie about Coca-Cola, and I started getting a tear in my eye.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I don't cry. I didn't even cry when somebody dies. So obviously that impacted me.

So I think it's one of those things as we talk about Great Place to Work certification— oof, say that 5 times fast— you know, like, why go through this process? And I think the thing for me, you know, that motivated me to like, hey, we should go do this, was the idea of learning and growing as a company. It's finding out like, well, what do other companies, you know, how do they rate themselves? What are things they're focused on? I think we're at a great place to work. And so I had that thought of, well, I think we've got a great culture, but how do I know?

Right.

And so we kind of went through this process with a little bit of just, let's just see what happens. And, Kari, you were instrumental for us going through this process. You kind of spearheaded this, you know, going through and making sure that the surveys were all set up and it was sent out. And so from your perspective, like, you know, difficulty of getting the process moving. Is this something that people can do pretty well and pretty easily, or is this like, yeah, it's going to take some time and thought?

Yeah, I would give the website platform usability kind of friendliness like a 7 out of 10. And this was something I talked with our representative too. There's a lot to do inside their website, inside their platform. There's a lot of robust, detailed information in there at your disposal. Which you can choose to dive into, or you can choose to just scratch the surface and get a little deep, whatever you need, whatever kind of depth that you're looking for to get out of the results. But just looking at it as a high level, it was, yes, it was very easy to use. It did not take very much time. Their questions were easy to answer, easy to find the information for. They kind of split it into results, and then there's like a little exam questionnaire that they ask you about demographics of your company and specifics like that. And so it's like a real easy two-part— take the survey, answer the questionnaire, and I mean, we were certified pretty quickly. So yeah, I would say overall the usability of the website was very nice.

Yeah, and doing the questionnaire was, you know, there was definitely some things we had to pull in. We're like, oh, that's a payroll question, or that's an HR question. So you might have to include some other organizations. But overall, you know, that part of it didn't go too, too poorly. Taking the survey as an employee only took 5 minutes. It was pretty quick.

It was quick, but there were a lot of questions.

There were a lot of questions. It's very thorough.

When I pulled it up, I was surprised. I'm like, holy crap.

Yeah. And so you think you're going to be there for a little while.

Yeah.

But then, you know, it's 5 minutes and you're done. You're like, oh, okay, that wasn't as bad as I thought it would be.

No, but it's multiple choice.

Yeah. And the breadth of the questions I thought was, you know, was intriguing as well because there are questions that I wouldn't normally consider throwing into an anonymous employee survey that I thought were insightful. So going through the process, you know, it does cost. It's not free, but you can go to greatplace2work.com. You can sign up for, you know, to talk to somebody and go through their demo process that they, you know, you can talk through them. Ask them questions about the process itself. And then what was the length that we spent on that, Kira? Was it 2 weeks, 3 weeks? How long was that open?

The survey was open for our company for 2 weeks, and I think that's pretty standard time. I think everyone, like, depending on your size of your company, I think everyone gets 2 weeks. Whether or not everybody gets all the surveys in right away or not, it stays open for 2 weeks.

Yeah, and you do have to have at least 65% participation. Just in order to get certified.

And then there's a higher sort of percentage to get on other specific lists.

Yeah, so they do, they do take everybody's applications and they will break you down onto a bunch of different lists. And so, you know, if you want to know if you're the best technology firm, if you're the best small business, best medium-sized business, they have lists of top 100s, top 200s. And, you know, but you do have to have— what did they say for that? 90% participation or something like that?

For some of them, yeah, the percentages vary based on, once again, size of company. And some of them you don't even qualify for. Like, top— certain, like, top 100s only qualify if you have a minimum of 1,000 employees. And some of them are only for 500 to 1,000, like mid-sized companies. So that is dependent on that too.

Yep. So as we kind of went through it, though, it was fun for me. And I don't think you guys have seen the results yet. We're going to talk about them a little bit. Tomorrow as we kind of make the big announcement to our staff. And then we go through the process of, you know, kind of celebrating the achievement. But for me, going through the responses, it was really insightful. You know, there's two questions on there was basically, you know, if you could change anything at RTA, what would you change? And if, you know, like, would you recommend this place to your friends or family? Oh, and I'm trying to remember the other comment question. But there was some really good, and what was something unique about the culture that you appreciate?

What sets the company apart? Yeah, what sets the company apart?

Yeah, yeah. And that was really insightful. It was nice to see some of the things that they talked about for us, like living and breathing the culture, that it wasn't just something that was up on the walls. And it was like, wow, there's some validation there. And so those of you who are going through this whole Fleet Success Playbook and trying to incorporate this, this is a great way to kind of get validation and see how are you doing? Maybe benchmark yourself and say, let's do it this year when we haven't done anything. And then next year and the year after, as we've kind of implemented our culture and implemented our values and our hiring processes, and we've gone through and we've gotten really good about our KPIs around resource efficiency and stakeholder satisfaction, let's see how the culture grows and whether or not we start getting more participation, more engagement out of our team as we kind of do some of these things, implement some of these practices.

Seems to me like it's just, we're just starting now that we're certified, really. It's kind of that total ownership where we got to, now we have to go that next level.

Well, you know, I'm going to kind of pop the balloon a little bit for us. Like, we got 100% on that survey. So for us, now it's going to be about, there are things that I, as I was reading through the answers, you know, things that we can do and implement differently on our side. I know one of the big questions that came out was, you know, profit sharing and around equity and compensation, things like that. And so I'm looking at those and saying, okay, well, what do we need to change here? And so it gives you an opportunity now to have a deeper level conversation around a specific topic and say, okay, we were 100% overall, but how could we get some of these others that were at 95% up to a 96 or 97? And there's like 20 categories that they kind of rate you on.

And there's more you could have— we could have added to.

Oh yeah.

Like a lot more. You can kind of like tailor the question styles around what's valuable to your company. Some things are non-applicable, some things are. And so that was really cool too, is you could see the whole survey before it went out and kind of make adjustments based on like there are certain values at your company that are really important to you that you know are important. And you can tailor your questions to those values.

Yep.

That kind of makes it hard to benchmark yourself against other companies, though, because you're not asking the same questions?

But you're asking the same category of questions. And the way you benchmark yourself against the other companies is you've got your overall score, but then also everybody gets a certain minimum set of questions.

Right. OK. And there's certain values you can't take off that they ask everybody, and then you can add additional on.

Yeah, and so they have a way to segregate out, like, here's our great place to work questionnaire. And then here's your supplemental questions.

Okay.

And so it makes it, you can get really specific. You can ask things demographically, like break it down by age, gender. They break it down by, we could do department, we could do tenure at the company. So it's very interesting to see too, is one of the things they pulled out is that, hey, like among Gen Xers, you're kind of struggling in a few of these areas, but then with your Boomers and your Millennials, like you're actually doing really well. And so it was really interesting to see how the generational impact affected the response rates, which I would have never looked at before.

Right.

Yeah. And so I thought that was interesting as well. But benefits, one of the things that's going to come from this that I have seen come and what I'm hoping happens here as well is, you know, as you're looking at ways to set yourself apart as a fleet and trying to set yourself apart when you're trying to recruit new talent or retain existing talent, You have this banner and it almost becomes like this identity, right? That it's not just that we think we're a great place to work, but we are a certified great place to work. And you can share that in your recruiting messages as you talk to new technicians, as you talk to your current employees, and they get this mindset too of like, well, I know I work at a great place, you know, whereas before it was kind of like, I think I work at a pretty great place, or like in your case, Jeff, I know that I didn't work at a great place at 5 of these companies.

Yeah.

You know, but it definitely helps on recruiting and retention, which I know are 2 of the biggest things that we're dealing with in this industry with the technician shortage and things of that nature. Other benefits that you guys think, you know, we're going to have the certification, we've just gone live with it. Other benefits you guys see is getting certified, seeing some of these responses, seeing some of the results. That you as a manager would say, "Wow, that would be really impactful for us as an organization." So I got two questions.

One is, you can go on their website and see who is certified.

Yes.

Can you see who did not get certified?

I don't know. That's a good question.

It is a good question.

Right? Because that'd also be interesting to know. Someone actually went—

They applied and they didn't get it.

And they didn't get it, so they've obviously got some internal issues.

You also get certified for like a year, like So you have to redo it every year. And you have to redo it every year. And like some people are still on the list, but then they won't make it. Like our list won't go through again until like May. So like we won't like show on like specific lists until they rerun the list, even though we're certified now. So yeah, there's a, there's a little bit of disparity there.

Yeah, but our profile is live.

Yes.

And so like any company, you should be able to go see and just say, hey, is this company on the Certified Great Place to Work website? Like we're now on that website, and so I know there's other companies that would be on there, but I wouldn't be able to tell if someone did—

they had failed or something.

If they failed.

But I guess it's a good guide if you're going to interview somewhere for a job, right? You're getting offered, you can go to this site and say, hey, they actually got certified, so obviously their other employees think that it's a good place to work.

Yeah.

Versus maybe somewhere else you may be considering. I don't know, I guess probably the benefits are one is I like that you know, how you get the introspection to see what you need to work on yourself as the company. That's a benefit. But from the outside, like from whether it's your customers, your vendors, you know, people that you deal with, they can see that and say, hey, we've actually got a good partner because not only they're a good partner for us for whatever reason, but they treat their employees well enough.

Take care of the people.

Yeah, that also think it's good. And for people that actually work there, It should be a good retention tool, especially in a hot job market. You know, you could leave for what could be the grass is greener, but a lot of people have experience and they've had multiple jobs and they take the survey and they say, yes, this is a great place to work. You can learn from others.

Yeah, I think that's interesting too, right, is that grass is greener comment is because you can have people leave and think, oh well, I'm going to a better place to work. But well, that's interesting because, you know, like you look at their scores, they're at, you know, 76 and we're at 100. So maybe they're not, but maybe they're better for you. So I think it's an interesting proposition.

Well, and on top of that, there's, there's got to be a ton of companies out there that would never do this.

Oh, right, because they just know they would never make it.

Yeah, I mean, Knight Transportation circa 2000 would never do this, right?

Well, and yeah, and I think you have to be at a point maturity-wise as a company that you would actually do something about it. Yeah, right, because at that point maybe they just didn't care, right? They're like, no, you know, not really.

And I actually think that they'd probably get certified if they did it today, but back then, but that was their kind of their learning and growth path, right? Right, you had to realize that, hey, there's high turnover, there's a lot of things that are wrong that we've got to change.

Yeah, and that kind of goes to that maturity, right? It's like, we've got to change something, we've got to learn something. There's, you know, uh, like an organizational humility that has to come from that. And so, yeah, that's a—

that's a—

one of the benefits might be if someone's contemplating two job offers, you know, and it could be something that pushes somebody certified and another company's not, right?

Yeah, I could tell you this is definitely going in the Culture Primer, you know, which is another thing that everybody should have, you know, is something to explain to new candidates, you know, what they're— what they're all about, what they're looking for.

Yeah, I mean, I guess overall I don't see a downside to doing something like this because you have, you know, you have a couple results, right? You get certified and it's kind of some verification of what you're doing and you're going in the right direction, or you don't get certified and you realize, hey, we've got some work to do because obviously there's a lot of dissatisfaction internally.

Yeah, and there's definitely something powerful about the anonymous survey versus, you know, like just asking people in person or or doing your one-on-ones or things like that. Like there's just, there's a lot more candor that comes out in an anonymous survey.

And having a third-party company do it helps to verify that it's anonymous because everyone knows, hey, it's anonymous survey. Is it really anonymous? I couldn't tell you how many times I got asked after this went out, is it really anonymous? Can they see who we are?

Right. They really can't. Definitely cannot see who you are because there was 2 or 3 people we were trying to rally at the very end. We're like, hey, we're almost there to 100% participation. Couldn't figure out who the 2 or 3 people were. And I'm like, well, that'd be really nice to know. So, but no, you can't even see if they've completed the survey or not. So that's one of my feedbacks to them was like, hey, it'd be really nice just to be able to see completed, yes or no. That's all I need to know.

Don't tell me what they said.

Sure.

Like I care about what they said, but I don't need to know who said what, but just tell me if they've completed it or not so I know who to follow up with. So. Kira, any other takeaways as you've gone through this process? Any recommendations to people? How are you feeling at the end of all this?

I feel like when we first started and you're like, "I'd like to look into getting Great Place to Work certified," and I was like, "Hold the front door." Like, this is going to be huge work. So much work and months of effort. And that's like that. I always just thought that that was going to be just a huge lift. I'm like, "Okay, when we have some downtime, we'll get into it." And then we had our first 30-minute call with the representative, and they walked us through, and we're like, "Wow, wait, like, that's it? Like, literally, you just want us to send out a survey, wait 2 weeks, fill out a little questionnaire, and we're done?" And they're like, "Yeah, and you'll get your results." I think we literally— I think I submitted it, and within 2 hours, I think, 2, 3 hours, we had an email back saying, "You're certified." And, well, I'm like, that was— So don't be afraid of it. It's—

It felt a little bit anticlimactic.

It did a little bit. If I'm honest.

It was like— Here's an email. I'm like, oh, you're expecting—

cool, right?

Like, where's the celebration? You know, like, where's my phone call? It says, hey, congratulations, you did it! You know, like, give me some suspense and some reveal.

No, it was just like, oh yeah, here you go, you're done, you did it, great job. And then when I saw 100%, I was like, this has got to be a joke, this is spam. Like, did somebody get us and they're punking us and they know that we did this?

And well, because you do have to hit a threshold to to get the certification. And it was like 65% participation and 70% saying that you're a great place to work. When we first set out, we were like, well, let's just see where we end up. And I think we were expecting maybe 75%. We definitely weren't expecting 90s%. So to see 100%, I was like, there's something wrong. The survey is broken.

It was also cool to see how excited when we told people that we were going to be doing it. And we're like, oh, I really hope that we get participation, and I think we had— throwing a number out here— I'd be comfortable saying we had about 80% of people fill out the survey within the first day that we sent out the survey. We're like, hey everybody, go on here, and everybody went on there and did it almost immediately. I was like, wow, okay, I thought that was going to be hard, and I had like 8 emails drafted for those 2 weeks for you to send out, and we barely needed any of them. Everyone really rallied together and did it.

Yeah, I think we hit our participation threshold. Maybe it's not 65%, maybe it's 80%, because it was like 32, if I remember right. We had to have— yeah, I think it was 80% participation in order to get certified, and then 90% if you wanted to get on the lists. And so, yeah, I think we were just on the cusp of it by the end of week 1. And so there was just 1 or 2 people who were like, hey, let's go. So a couple reminder emails, and we were pretty much done by— with 2 or 3 days left to go. And Kira was out on vacation and we were going on vacation, so it was really nice.

It was great.

It was easy.

I think my final takeaway would be that like this is not a blanket statement. It's like we constantly say, like, I love my job. Arte is a great place to work. I love this place to work. And like, you're like, okay, okay, okay. But this was literally an anonymous survey that we sent out to everybody that we could have found some great skeletons in our closet. And instead we got 100%. So like this is a— scientific, psychological, external source who came in, took a look at all of us, and rated us greatly, which is great. Like, if this is a certification that we now have, it's not just us spewing hyperbole. Yep. Yeah.

So, all right, well, uh, that's going to wrap it up for us today. Again, if you want to look at any of the things we talked about, greatplace2work.com. You can go fill out some of their information, check out some of their, you know, I guess infographics and marketing materials they have. You can check us out if you're looking for the Fleet Success Playbook where we talk about doing surveys and talk about some of these things. In fact, Steve's story about Coca-Cola is in that book. You can go to fleetsuccessplaybook.com and email us there for a copy of the book. If you have any questions, comments, you can send an email to podcast@rtfleet.com. And lastly, I'm super excited about this. We've got Fleet Success Summit coming up next year, 2.0. We're locking down, we got the, we're locking down the dates. We're going to be at the Luxor Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada in March 2023. You can go to fleetsuccesssummit.com and it's going to be awesome. We had an awesome time at Fleet Success Summit 1.0.

We did.

Summit 2.0 is going to be 2.0 greater.

It's going to be better.

That's right.

I think so too.

So We learned a lot of lessons from number 1, and it really went on. It went amazing.

It went great. So it can't get anywhere but better.

It's like getting 100 on Great Place to Work Certification Service.

Now what?

Now what? Way to circle back. All right. Well, that's going to do it for us until next time.