Issue link: http://palletcentral.uberflip.com/i/1464021
26 PalletCentral • March-April 2022 palletcentral.com 'If you guys meet our goals we will take you bowling.' We work hard at regularly engaging our employees and rewarding accordingly in all sorts of ways. We also have a lot of informal communication with our employees as we interact with them on the floor." Happiness and profits As the experiences of these businesses suggest, keeping employees happy starts with good communications. And fostering feedback from employees can create a cooperative work environment that bolsters the bottom line. "e organizations I've worked with that are the happiest are those where employees have reached collaboration," said Dyer. "When an organization gets to a state of teamwork and collaboration and the employees feel like they're a part of the success of the organization, you end up developing what I call 'enthusiastic productivity.' e happier the employees, the more engaged they are. e more ownership they have with what's going on within the business or organization, the more pride of workmanship that they can develop, which leads to greater overall productivity." Industry Week magazine sponsors an annual best plants competition for which Dyer serves as a judge. "It's interesting how most of the winners, especially in the last three or four years, have also won the distinction of being a best place to work," he says. "ere's a pretty good correlation between best place to work, employee happiness, and plant performance and productivity." While the right formula of salary, benefits and perks is vital to employee happiness, managers need to realize the larger role played by human relations. "Benefits are just dollars and cents," said Van Zeeland. "But what's also been really important for us is treating employees the way we would want to be treated. We just hired one person today who left his former employer where he was getting the same rate of pay, because he wanted to get back into more of a family-type environment. Many times, larger corporations will treat people more like numbers than individuals." For Kehneman, it all boils down to the old saying, don't tell me how much you care, show me how much you care. "We try our best to show employees how much we care by the programs that we have for them and with job security." Award-winning journalist Phillip M. Perry has published widely in the fields of business management, workplace psychology and employment law. A 20-year veteran, Perry is syndicated in scores of magazines nationwide.