Culture
When Brett started the company, he wanted to create something that people wanted to be part of, both customers and employees. He wanted a “Work Hard, Play Hard” culture that brings out the best in the people. To us, culture is how we treat each other, make decisions together, rally together, and support each other. It’s the unwritten way we conduct ourselves and serves as our guiding conscience.
Vision
As we strategically looked at our business, we decided we needed a vision statement that would resonate with our customers and our people. Since the injection molding world is very reputation-based, we wanted to include this in our vision. Reputation affects our ability to attract and retain customers and our ability to attract and retain talented individuals. Our vision is:
"To be the most reputable molder/manufacturer by growing our people and our business."
Core Values
We have expectations of our people and more expectations of our leaders and this reflected in our core values and our leadership credo. In fact, we recently updated our core values which were developed over 10 years ago. To reflect ourselves today, and for the future, we modified our 6 core values to include the characteristics of creativity, integrity, and listening. Here are our current core values:
As individuals, we are:
- “Signed On” – committed to improving the company, our customers’ products, and the environment we live in
- Creative and critical thinkers who demonstrate common sense
- Respectful, honest, and acting with integrity
- Team players, friendly, open minded, and play well together
- Inquisitive, intelligent, and willing to learn
- Willing to listen, teach, and share knowledge
Leadership Credo
We have high expectations of all of our managers and supervisors. Our leaders participate in external leadership training and we also conduct leadership training internally. Recently, we developed a leadership credo:
As leaders, we are:
- Committed to grow people personally and professionally through humility and servant leadership. In addition, we are dedicated to “finding a better way” through courage, persistence, and collaboration
Culture Initiatives
A grassroots team was formed several years ago to maintain and improve our culture. Our mission statement is:
- Rally together as a team, trust & support as a family, and not let each other down
As a result of this team, we’ve instituted the following:
- Employee survey
- Lunch & Learn sessions
- Crash the Meeting
- Leadership Expectations/Guidelines training
- Interview process that includes members of the Culture Club
- Welcome to my World sessions
- Skip level meetings (V.P.s engage with other areas, mostly production)
- Learning Hmong
Social Events
We have a team dedicated to finding ways for people to get to know each other as people. As a result of our team, we’ve done a lot of fun activities including following:
- Bags tournaments
- Battle of the Bands
- BINGO
- Bowling
- Chili contest
- Egg drop challenge
- Elf on a Shelf
- Fish fry
- Halloween costume contest
- Jersey day
- Name that baby
- Name that pet
- National hot cocoa day
- Ornament contest
- Paper airplane challenge
- Soup contest
- Steps challenge
- Ugly sweater day
- United Way challenge
- Weight loss challenge
Working Here
We try to uphold and practice our core values every day. We try to be a family and understand we are each responsible to make that happen. Our goal is for all people to be empowered and respected as individuals and recognized for their contributions and ideas. In some companies, it’s weird to hear laughter in the halls. At our company, it’s weird if we don’t hear laughter somewhere.
We develop growth plans & paths for individuals and this includes job shadowing, mentoring, time with subject matter experts, internal training, and external training. In fact, many of our positions are filled from within the organization. We are fortunate to have world class customers. Overall, we feel this is a special place to work and we also offer competitive wages.
