Our (Engaged) People Are Our Greatest Asset

Case in Point: Pretzels, Inc.

Pretzels, Inc. is a 40-plus-year-old premier snack company with state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities in Bluffton and Plymouth, Ind. The company was an early adopter of the OpX Workforce Engagement Framework. 

“We saw early on that regardless of the projects undertaken in pursuit of better business outcomes, none could be successful without a fully engaged workforce to see them through,” says Paul Schaum, chief technical officer at Pretzels, Inc. “With help from the FSO Institute, we have made significant improvements in the overall engagement of our employees and continue to move the needle in a positive engagement direction.” 

Workforce engagement is a big initiative to tackle all at once. To begin the journey, Pretzels, Inc. focused on a few, but vital, first steps to improve employee engagement.

As chief operating officer at the time, Schaum recognized the need to get the shop floor working on items that meant something to them. So along with a team of front-line supervisors, they declared a war on waste. While the focus was primarily on waste, Schaum also let multiple groups of supervisors pick what they wanted to work on to channel the energy and deliver some quick wins. Coaches from the FSO Institute then joined the groups and helped them structure the projects from problem statements to root cause analysis to execution on the shop floor.

With the emphasis on learning by doing, this approach taught and demonstrated engagement while waging a war on waste, instead of teaching engagement and then doing battle on waste. Additionally, waste reduction was something that supervisors could embrace.  

Getting others involved

With such a strong focus on people, Pretzels, Inc. expanded the leadership team to include its human resources department, which quickly identified some of the challenges and opportunities around workforce engagement.  

One of the most significant challenges Pretzels, Inc. faced was overcoming “the way things are done around here.” A common refrain regarding organizational change is “what got you here, won’t get you there.” So Schaum created a “burning platform” with the war on waste and brought the group in on off days to stress urgency and remove them from the daily fire fight. This allowed the team time to identify and put in play how things could be done. Change is difficult, and Schaum realized that a clear vision of what to move toward versus away from was key to success. By giving the team time to work on the business instead of in it, they were able to clarify and rally around the vision.

However, knowing where you’re going doesn’t always get you there. It takes work, especially teamwork and collaboration. To accelerate the process, Pretzels, Inc. used the OpX Workforce Engagement Framework to help supervisors think about how to engage employees to help get the work done. Initially, just the supervisors took the Readiness for Workforce Engagement survey to assess the company’s foundational readiness for workforce engagement and to identify opportunities for early successes. Items like lack of trust were identified and openly discussed, and multiple examples of improvement were demonstrated.

A critical challenge that Pretzels, Inc. faced—one that most companies face—is how to get employees to buy in to change, take ownership of it, and become advocates for it. The 47 characteristics in the OpX Workforce Engagement Framework provide guidance on how to engage employees so that the journey from buy-in to advocacy is more manageable.

Actions taken

Once these challenges and opportunities were sorted out, an action plan was developed and implementation began.  

Interestingly, one of the key components of a collaboration culture is spending time together. Schaum wanted to create opportunities for his leaders to simply spend more time together and begin talking to one another more often. In addition to the war on waste lean projects, the management team held multiple off-site sessions to help them break down the walls between silos and begin to gel as a team. At these retreats, many of the characteristics of the OpX Workforce Engagement Framework were addressed, especially as they fit into discussions by the team of the day-to-day challenges they faced. Again, the emphasis was on learning while doing—not learning, then doing.  

As emotional intelligence (EQ) has become increasingly more important for effective leadership, Pretzels, Inc. invested in EQ assessment for all leaders. The assessment and individual coaching offered to all leaders allowed them to take inventory of their EQ strengths and opportunities and put action plans in place to better interact and engage with the rest of the organization.

A complement to the OpX framework, the Workforce Engagement Journey Assessment allows a company to assess where their employees stand on the 47 characteristics of engagement. Assessments were administered at both Pretzels, Inc. facilities and were directly tied to the OpX Workforce Engagement Framework. As follow-up to the assessment, small group discussions were held with shop floor personnel to flesh out areas of opportunity and growth.  

Key outcomes

As noted by Gallup, engaged employees produce better business outcomes. As a result of the employee engagement experience at Pretzels, Inc., the company benefited from several key outcomes. 

Regarding performance improvements, in just the first round of engagement activities with the supervisors and the war on waste, yield savings delivered in excess of $1 million, and supervisors harvested a variety of new tools they could employ to address issues on the floor.

A look at productivity improvements revealed that the quality department implemented two improvements that saved more than half a million pounds of waste and put 18 production days back in the system.

Cultural benefits

From a human resources perspective, Pretzels reaped some key cultural improvements as a result of the employee engagement actions taken. Much of the time spent in the off-site sessions focused on key cultural components, like leadership, teamwork, and individual accountability.

A Pretzels-centric definition of leadership helped get everyone on the same page regarding leadership behaviors expected throughout the company. Additionally, individual coaching for select leaders helped high potential individuals accelerate and other individuals identify blind spots. In one case, work and accountability were pushed down to more appropriate levels of the organization and engagement of the entire department increased.

Out of the off-site sessions, a Pretzels-centric definition of teamwork was developed. The war on waste process set the standard for cross-functional teams at the shop-floor level and is still employed today as new projects are rolled out.

Likewise, individual accountability for producing better business outcomes was front and center during the off-site sessions. A significant outcome here was the development of growth and improvement plans for individuals that not only holds them accountable, but helps them learn how to be more accountable. The EQ assessment and training provided the opportunity for each leader to develop and implement a plan. As new supervisors are employed, it will be part of the standard training and qualification that is now being developed.

Once started, Schaum cautions that it is critical to stay the course on the engagement journey. “In a rapidly expanding business like ours, it is easy in the heat of the moment to go back to the old way of doing things and just simply tell people what to do. You need to resist this and, instead, continue to engage your people to make decisions and do the right thing. You have to trust the engagement process you’ve put in place.

“While there is more to come on our journey to employee engagement, we have already begun to see the benefits that an engaged workforce can bring to making better business outcomes for our company,” says Schaum. “Positively tapping into that discretionary effort that employees can choose to make through improved engagement can benefit all involved. Employees enjoy a better work environment, and the company enjoys better business outcomes. That’s a win-win!”

About the Case in Point Series

In the past few years, PMMI’s OpX Leadership Network has produced more than 20 manufacturing process-improvement documents for consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies and original equipment manufacturers (OEM). More recently, the FSO Institute has facilitated the adoption and implementation of these documents, especially for food and beverage manufacturers. In this 2020 Case in Point series with the FSO Institute, ProFood World presents actual cases to show just how CPGs are using OpX documents to improve their overall manufacturing health and their collaboration with OEMs and other suppliers. Learn more at www.fsoinstitute.com.