The workforce challenge that isn’t going away

The following transcript was edited from a discussion on labor at this year’s Pit & Quarry Roundtable & Conference.

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P&Q: Labor remains a very real problem for the aggregate industry as producers continue to struggle to hire and retain quality people. With labor being a serious issue that isn’t going away, does it make sense for our greater industry – perhaps through an association effort or a collective effort of multiple organizations – to develop a campaign promoting the crushed stone, sand and gravel industry? Would such an effort help industry businesses like yours, or is the responsibility of attracting talent ultimately the sole task of individual companies? In the meantime, how are producers getting by in areas where they have shortfalls? How are you enticing people to stay within your organization rather than move on to greener pastures?

Tripp Hammett (Hammett Gravel Co.): You have to look at the reality within your organization. Do you pay well? That’s a big one for everybody. Are your facilities updated? Is your mobile equipment up to date? Those three things alone attract people and, if you are running a quality organization and culture, it’s the way that you present your organization, and is it a happy place to work?

I can’t harp on the compensation thing enough. I know within our market, people want to make money and you’ve got to be competitive there. So if you have quality plants and equipment, then that alone goes a long way.

Tommy Daniel (Polydeck): For our employee retention, we put a lot of different things in place for employee care, things we do for employees, extended training and leadership training.

Everybody goes through leadership training. We try to identify who has potential for more leadership to try to keep pulling them up. We’ve done wage studies where we [want] to make sure we are paying the going rate.

We are in Spartanburg, South Carolina. In Greenville, there are a couple of big manufacturer facilities that really suck the labor. So we’ve had to do a lot of those things to make sure we are paying competitive rates.

Brian Hollrah (Alleyton Resource Co.): One of the things we looked into doing this year was focus on that total compensation statement. A lot of employees will look at just the hourly rate and say, ‘I can get paid two bucks higher here,’ but they may not get insurance or [a] 401(k) or other benefits. [It’s] really putting out there what it costs to do all these other benefits, and showing them that this is a career – not just a job. It’s what we really focus on, and that’s gone a long way for us.

Hal Williford (Memphis Stone & Gravel): Our top leadership team goes to every one of our facilities four times a year. We call it the communication tour. Sometimes it’s talking about the benefits, sometimes it’s just talking about our projections for the year.

At first, everybody sits there, looks at you and you say, ‘Do you have any questions?’ They don’t want to respond. But after doing it for two and a half years, we are starting to get a lot of good feedback. They are even asking about our competitors and how they are going to affect our business.

We’ve actually gotten some good ideas from our lower-level employees regarding better ways that we can run our business.

Peter Kilmurray (Haver & Boecker): Communication is a big thing with our employees. If they know what’s going on within the company financially, it makes them feel good if you had a record year.

Every 100 days, we do a communications meeting and share everything going on.
We share any investment we’ve done, any growth we’ve done and new employees that come on. Salespeople come to our facility and spend two weeks there. The second week is actually on the floor assembling the machine and working on the [screen] media side. They are hands-on as a salesperson. They know exactly what we do, and that helps them going out.

P&Q: Do you have more trouble hiring or retaining people?

Jason Emch (The Shelly Company/CRH): We see both sides of it. When we do find a quality candidate, it becomes about trying to sell the company being the employer of choice and doing different things (i.e., compensation) to retain that employee.

Then, there are some employees who get a taste of the industry and [realize] it’s not for them. There are some employees we get a taste for, and we choose that they are not the right employee for The Shelly Company.

To take one approach to labor is to maybe be a bit naïve. It needs to be a more brushstroke-type facet approach to try to improve that labor.

P&Q: Are there certain positions you have more difficulty filling?

Hollrah: We struggle on the mechanics side and mobile equipment – at least in our region that is really tight. So we have to outsource a lot of that work as a result.

Warren Hawkridge (Hinkle Contracting Co.): I would agree. We can find labor and we can find equipment operators, but it’s more the mechanics, the welding people, the electrician, the people that can do major repair projects for us. Those are the ones we have problems finding and retaining.

John Garrison (Superior Industries): We do well with hiring engineers, and we do a lot of recruiting from colleges. We have roughly 100 interns every summer across our sites who come into the business. A lot of them are second and third year, so we bring a lot of folks in that way.

But at the manufacturing-site level, keeping welders or getting people who want to weld is very difficult to do. In our home office in Minnesota, we have a weld school where we bring farm kids out from high school and middle school. We have a virtual welder, so it’s like a video game. They get to kind of practice on that, and it gets them interested in doing it. Then, you go out and do classroom/real-world welding. We have been able to get people interested that way.

The skill side is much more difficult to fill than engineering or marketing, but then it’s really down to employee retention, too. The younger employees need more attention and feedback.

Inside our company, similar to the NSSGA (National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association) Young Leaders program, we started an internal program. We identify young people that we want to make sure we retain and make sure they have a good career path, understand what their next steps are, how they can grow in the company and kind of mentor them along.

Josh Swank (Philippi-Hagenbuch): We are dealing with a multigenerational workforce. We certainly evolved our hiring practices, based on what we are seeing with a lot more millennials coming.

We do talk about the expectations much clearer upfront, instead of making an offer and ‘here’s the compensation package.’ Now, we go through a 12-page document listing out everything, from the culture of the company to the responsibilities and expectations of their roles.

Once we bring a person in, we do the initial training, we add the expectations there, and then we closely watch them and work with them. Instead of maybe working with the person longer to find success in a role, we are going to approach them quicker and say, ‘This may not be the role for you, but based on what we’ve seen, you might be better off with this role.’

Rick Madara (Mclanahan Corp.): When I started, I remember my training process was literally sitting at a desk reading brochures of equipment that the company manufactured. Now, our onboarding process is a clearly-defined path of what a new hire was going to take.

It used to be that was a week-long thing, but now it’s up to a year. So you are clearly defining what you’re going to do from Day 1, all the way up to Day 365.

Through that whole process, they know exactly what they are going to do week to week. They understand what they are going to be doing, and they are going to make the decision if this is what they are going to do for [the] long term.

It’s a tough battle and it costs a lot of money, especially if you lose them. But you have to go through it. Everyone says it is not about the money. Well, it is about the money and, unfortunately, that’s the way it’s going to be.

As long as you are competitive and you can keep your employee enthused in a brand that you are trying to promote, I think they will stay with you. But you have to make sure they understand what their responsibilities are and what your responsibilities are.

Justin Mellott (Mellott Company): Another thing we started doing with all of the new hires, especially the millennial ones, is cross-training. This isn’t anything new.

We had a marketing person who joined last year. He’s 25 years old and he’s a photographer. He spent a week in the warehouse, and he would fulfill the shipping orders. We had him in fabrication a week, and he was learning how to weld, how to assemble chutes and tail sections. Then, we sent him to a contract-crushing site, and he got to work from 5:30 [a.m.] to 7 [p.m.] every day for four and a half or five days straight.

He kind of learned every aspect of the company. So many times, people come in and start working for a company that [they] don’t really understand all that well. You understand your small function of it, but you don’t understand the bigger picture of how that actually affects the business or the people that you’re working with or the customers you might be dealing with.

Better understanding your company as a whole is a really important thing. That’s something we really enjoyed, as well as the people who have partaken in it.

Dan Goethel (Rogers Group): Rather than filling the seat, which we have been doing in the past, we are looking at and strategizing how we can develop crews in a ‘plus one.’

In other words, having additional crew members so that in the event you do have an individual who decides to move on to another industry or another company, you can then take a little bit at a time to find a good, quality candidate and invest in those candidates.

Travis Wise (Wingra Stone): Wingra just started actively posting our positions on the military job boards, and we actually are doing a partnership with Wisconsin National Guard Reserves to try to hire some of those reservist and guard members. We’ve actually had some pretty good luck with good résumés coming in. We have some pretty good traction on the military end of it where we’ve never before tried.