Goals for 2023 Defined at ProVia Leadership Summit

ProVia recently held our annual Leadership Summit, where we gather all the employees who have at least one direct report. The meeting serves as a time to align on strategies, goals, and initiatives for the year ahead. This event also helps ignite the momentum and positive energy we want to spread through our entire company.

Over the past three years, we’ve all endured significant chaos and many distractions. My sense today is that business cycles and market needs are getting back to a normal mode of operation. For ProVia, we’ve determined that this means 2023 is a good time to focus on fundamentals, including safety, quality, and leadership development. We discussed these areas in detail at the Summit.

As we expand ProVia’s facilities across Ohio and Mississippi, we’re implementing our high standard for safety programs in all locations. At our long-established facilities in Walnut Creek, Sugarcreek, and Baltic, Ohio we are committed to maintaining our Star Certification, which is the highest level of certification available under OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP).

For our more recently established facilities at Booneville, Mississippi, and Cherry Ridge (Sugarcreek), Ohio, we’re working toward becoming VPP certified this year. Our Strasburg, Ohio, plant is too new yet to be certified – several years of performance data is required – but you can be sure we are laying a strong foundation of safety, so we can pursue this when the appropriate time comes along.

Just as we do with our products and manufacturing processes, our safety programs are pursued with a goal of continuous improvement. Therefore, we have other safety initiatives underway in 2023, including further reduction of DART rates (a measure of workplace injuries and illnesses) and enhancing our plan for employee security.

A longstanding hallmark of ProVia products and service is premium quality. As a company, we continually strive to uphold quality in all we do. Responses submitted through our recent employee opinion survey confirm that a high standard of quality is mutually valued by employees. This supports the idea that quality is “who we are” as individuals—and as a company. Likewise, our customers and their installers expect consistent, premium quality from us, so we’re working on expanding the systems we use to gather feedback from them. I look forward to the improvements this will enable us to achieve.

In our annual employee opinion survey, one of the common themes we observed was that our team places high value on communication from supervisors and leaders. Therefore, we’ll maintain a focus on enhancing communication activities in 2023.

We’re also rolling out a new initiative called Pathway to Serve, which is a leadership training program designed to proactively support, serve, and train ProVia leaders to thrive on the road ahead. While leadership development has been in place for many years now, Pathway to Serve introduces many new learning opportunities, including ProVia Leads 201 – a 9-week intensive training program covering topics relevant to leadership.

To excel in any pursuit, whether at work, play, or in our families and communities, one must continuously practice the basic skills required for tasks. Quarterbacks, no matter how elite, need to routinely practice passing, running backs need to practice their routes, and basketball players need to practice basic foul shots. After a couple atypical years, it’s exciting to guide our leaders on a journey of doubling down on the fundamentals of our operations and focusing on enhancing the areas I’ve outlined here. We left the Leadership Summit invigorated and unified in our understanding of the goals we’ll be working toward in 2023.