Investing in “ProVia Values”

Every month we have an all-employee meeting we call “ProVia Values”, where we gather employees in our facility lunchroom areas (both here in Ohio and in Booneville, MS) and serve a catered breakfast buffet for all to enjoy. Once everyone gets seated, one of the members of our Corporate Leadership Team (CLT) makes some opening remarks and then plays a video presentation that lasts about a half hour.

All employees are “on the clock” during this time frame, plus our team puts a lot of work into these meetings – especially the videos – so overall, this represents a significant commitment of resources. Why do we make this kind of investment every month?

The Importance of Supporting Company Culture
Company culture is more important than ever, especially for a growing organization like ProVia. We intentionally seek out people who are a good fit for our culture, and we continuously work on supporting and maintaining that culture to ensure we have an environment where employees can thrive.

Too Good to Be True?
When new employees experience our culture for the first time, they sometimes feel like it’s too good to be true. Recently I was talking with Carly Frankovich, who’s in charge of the onboarding training that takes place here every week, and she shared an interesting story about this (one that’s a common occurrence).

A new employee in one of her classes raised his hand and commented, “To me, it seems too good to be true here. When does the other shoe drop?” She told him “I’ve been here a couple years now, and I still haven’t experienced that moment.”

I must admit, I too had that skeptical feeling when I started with ProVia 21 years ago. I thought, “Surely this is just a façade that I’ll eventually see through, and I’ll become disenchanted.” It took a while for me to trust that ProVia is genuinely as good as it seems. But in all my years with the company, that hasn’t happened, which is so refreshing. People see this – that we’re different in meaningful ways – and they want to be a part of it.

Our ProVia Values meetings are one of the ways we work to support and ensure the consistency of our culture. We have 19 company values in total, and each month, we pick a particular value to focus on. As an example, for the month of July we selected the value of “Quality” as our focus, which we define as follows: “We are committed to consistently producing best-in-class products.” So that month’s video featured a detailed look at what Quality means to us and to our suppliers.

We’ve done quite a few ProVia Values videos at this point, so we’ve come up with a format we feel works best. Since I often get asked about this, I thought I’d share a typical agenda with you, and you can also watch this abbreviated video, which captures some of the highlights from a typical session.

These meetings are led in-person by a CLT member, and we open each session in prayer. Following that we share brief announcements, which are typically facility-specific. Then we go right to the video, which proceeds as follows:

• Introduction from Brian Miller, President & CEO
• Discuss Selected “Value of the Month”
• Employee Recognition: This is an important section where we show the names and photos of employees who are celebrating their work anniversary, while also recognizing them for a Value they’ve personally embodied in their work.
• Review Product Sales Data
• Company Announcements
• Introduce Special Programs (as appropriate)
• Provide Language Translations (as appropriate for local employee demographics)
• Wrap-Up from Brian Miller

Once the video wraps up, we take comments and answer any questions from the group.

We get great feedback about this program from our people, so that makes all the hard work worth it. What matters most is seeing the way employees live out our Values in their actions every day. I think this is partly due to the excellent character they inherently bring to the table, but also from the investment and effort we put into supporting our ProVia Values program.