Like most organizations after the pandemic, at P.J. Wallbank Springs we were challenged to fill open roles on our manufacturing floor. Local competitors were offering hourly workers signing bonuses, gas cards, gym memberships, and other perks to try and attract new talent. Some competitors went so far as to increase hourly rates by a whopping 30-50%! If ever there was a war for talent, we were in the thick of it. As a culture-focused, People First organization that maintains a competitive advantage by the way we treat people, we didn’t need to take drastic measures to reinvent our employee value proposition. Yet, filling the hiring gap in a volatile labor market was by far our biggest challenge– or so we thought.

Our People Team, led by Tracey Fletcher, dug deep into the data and uncovered a startling truth. We didn’t have a hiring problem. We had a retention problem. This realization was the first critical step towards an intensive multi-year journey to improve Machine Operator turnover – a role that is the very lifeblood of our business.

Why wasn’t the real issue more evident? Like many organizations, P.J. Wallbank Springs measured and reported turnover on a monthly basis in the traditional way – by looking at overall company turnover across all roles and using an average number of employees for the period measured. The trouble was that this method of calculation was masking the true issue. When we began to look at it by role and take into consideration retention of new hires for the period measured, the data painted a much different picture. It was clear we needed to dig deeper and track more meaningful metrics.

What we found was that in the span of a year we had hired more than 80 people, most of them Machine Operators. Despite a flurry of hiring our turnover was more than 90%. We recognized we needed to act quickly, but we also understood that this would be a complex problem that would take a cross-functional team to solve. We assembled leaders from Production, Operations, the People Team, and Finance to come together for a series of intensive problem solving and planning sessions.

Our first order of business was a data walk. We covered the walls with everything we knew about the issue at hand. This included exit interview feedback, salary benchmarking data, local competitive turnover data, our historical turnover for the Machine Operator Role segmented by tenure, hiring metrics from the past several years, and feedback from stay interviews and our 30-day new hire survey. While walking through the data, we asked critical questions, challenged each other, and worked to identify what we might do to improve retention. Our biggest learning from this experience was that taking the time for a data-driven approach made for better quality solutions. We had to resist coming to quick conclusions and commit to challenging our initial assumptions.

The second action we took was to go to the source. Who better to help us understand the turnover challenge than our Machine Operators on the manufacturing floor? We brought in several teams to participate in roundtable listening sessions, led by our leaders. We invited new hires, tenured team members, trainers, and Operator Leaders from all shifts to participate. Our learnings from these sessions were exponential and formed the basis for the actions we would take going forward. It also afforded us the side benefit of deepening relationships between our production floor and our office support team. Participants felt seen and heard and appreciated that we wanted to collaborate on how to solve it. As an Evergreen® company, this was important to us; it created a spirit of “we’re all in this together” in what was otherwise a difficult time for the organization.

Locally, we are known for being a different kind of manufacturing company. We don’t just build machines and parts – we also build people. This starts with a supportive culture on the manufacturing floor rather than “yell and tell” which sadly is still reality in many organizations. Our listening session participants affirmed that one of our greatest strengths is how we treat people. We realized that we could improve turnover by doubling down on things we were already doing well, in addition to fixing parts of the Machine Operator experience that were sub-optimal.

An example of doubling down on what we already did well was to be more intentional about our onboarding sessions. New hires told us that they appreciated working for a family-owned organization in the community. So, we began holding group onboarding sessions whenever we had multiple people starting at the same time so that our new hires learned about the history of the company directly from me, a member of the Wallbank family. Learning the story behind the Wallbank name and also hearing first-hand how they are an important part of our future success was a simple, but powerful act that created a deeper sense of belonging and excitement to be part of P.J. Wallbank Springs.

We also took a cue from the success of our turnover problem-solving listening session and added a 30-Day listening session specific to new hires. In these sessions, we check-in on their training, understand what additional support they might need, clarify policies, and encourage them during what we learned to be the most vulnerable time to retention – the period between when their training ends and they are on their own for the first few weeks. These sessions went a long way in building trust, deepening our culture, and learning how best to support our newest team members.

We take pride in our training program for new Machine Operators which offers two weeks of support with a certified trainer and a number of tactile support tools to reinforce learning and build confidence in the role. At the time, new hires often commented how in-depth it went and how much they appreciated our approach. It would have been easy to overlook opportunities to strengthen our training program based on the feedback we had heard. However, by taking a “How might we?” mindset we discovered that we could take our program from good to great. We learned that our trainers were hungry to spend time together collectively to share their best tips and tricks and support each other. We began holding monthly train-the-trainer sessions to invest in this critical group of leaders. This resulted in greater consistency in training methods across trainers and across shifts. They were also given “trainer” shirts to wear to help new team members identify who they could go to for support even after the two-week period ended.

In the end, we learned from the data that our greatest opportunity to improve was in the first 30-days of hire. Our manufacturing process can feel complex to new Machine Operators and when the training period is over and they are on their own for the first time, they sometimes struggle to hit efficiency targets. While this is normal in the first month, it can also leave new employees feeling discouraged. Our Production Manager, Dawn Roe, realized that a high-touch, personalized approach with each person who might be struggling could help them feel more supported and get back on track. Through one-on-one conversations, she and our Operator Leaders learned what aspects of the role the new person was struggling with and worked with them directly. In some cases, stepping back and simply watching a skilled team member do the job made a dramatic difference. This high-touch and supportive coaching reinforced our culture and most importantly helped our newest team members feel they could be successful long-term.

Implementing learnings from our listening sessions, improving onboarding, investing in our trainers, and taking a high-touch approach to ongoing support are just some of the examples of actions we took to improve our retention. We also made changes with how our maintenance team supported Machine Operators and improved our hiring process by getting our Production Manager involved in interviews. We adjusted our shift differentials for wages to stay competitive and added an incentive for Machine Operators with seniority to run our more challenging jobs, which had previously fallen to our new hires. Our mindset was that this was a complex challenge, and we needed to examine all of our processes for opportunities to improve.

It wasn’t a single solution, but rather our data-based and human-centric People First approach that ultimately allowed us to be successful. We are highly encouraged by the results of our actions from 92% hourly turnover in 2022 to 36% in 2024. We’ve set our sights on achieving 25% in 2025 which would make our overall turnover half of the industry average. We learned a powerful lesson; when you identify a problem of this level, it’s important to examine all of your systems and practices to uncover meaningful ways to tackle it. It might seem counterintuitive to challenge the things you are already doing well, however, leaning in on your strengths can offer solutions that amplify the positive impact you are already making.