Over the past 7 months, the “DistributED with tED magazine” interviewed the 2022 tED magazine “30 Under 35” award winners to find out more about who they are, but most importantly, how they will shape our supply chain now and in the future.
In part one of this three-part series, we learned how the tED magazine “30 Under 35” view hiring, retention, and training.
In part two, we learn about culture, DEI, and the digital future.
Culture
Blaire Barlow, Wholesale Electric Supply
“We’re a family. We’re a unit. Keeping emotional connections with our employees is essential. When I go and call on customers with our sales team, we remember their kids’ names and we remember have they did in their last golf game. We understand that connection and that’s what makes us who we are.”
Drew Hagen, Viking Electric
“I am letting people figure things out for themselves. That’s been a work in progress, because it’s easy for me to dive in and fix a problem, but my mentors made me work out my problems. As a manager, that’s the most rewarding part is seeing co-workers figure out their problems and grow their careers.”
Tiffany Schroeder, Werner Electric Supply
“I was tasked with explaining what it takes to be an employee-friendly workplace, which includes what is valuable to an employee and what is attractive. It’s about the feeling that you create with your culture.”
DEI
Julia Gehman, NorthEast Electrical Supply
“There needs to be more inclusivity. I am doing a Connect ERG, which is a generational resource group that brings us together and is a good space for us to meet other people in our industry that are our age or similar ages and have the same values and it’s a good place for us to all connect. I think there has to be more of that to draw people in.”
Tyler Ihry, Border States
“I Belong Here, there are some eye-opening statistics, and right now while we are hiring, and I am keeping that in mind. Like looking at adjacent industries. You don’t think about it when you are hiring typically. We are all in this together. We are all dealing with the same issues, and we all shared some best practices that everyone could take away.”
Schroeder
“We care about the wellness of our employees themselves; we want to make sure we are supporting them any way we can. The view on wellness has grown from ‘hey, let’s get some exercise, let’s eat well’ to a lot of focus on mental illness, and mental illness has been a huge initiative this year and trying to get through all the obstacles with COVID and all of the things that go with it. Wellness impacts everything. It impacts how people perform, how teams interact, our attendance, our family situation, everything about a person is impacted by wellness and if we are not able to support that it’s a large blind spot for employers.”
Our Digital Future
Kathryn Williamson, Crawford Electric
“We focus on which digital platforms we want to promote the most because we have so many great platforms to talk about. We put our focus on where we thought our customers would have the most benefit. We are making a lot of enhancements to our website and our mobile offering, and we are taking the customer feedback into consideration, so it makes sense for all of our businesses.
“We are every day seeing more digital opportunities, and we can only address so many customers at a time. Almost every interaction we have with customers leads to us making tweaks for a better experience. I see some pretty significant digital enhancements in the future. If you look at where our website was 10 years ago, it’s completely different now, and we will incorporate it in the future.”
Amanda White, Siemens
“We are seeing how dependent we are on each other, especially when there are delays. We will be growing more efficient and investing in places that we have never invested before. And the biggest thing is going to be in diversifying the avenues we go through to get products and communicate with each other.”
Hagen
“The new generation of counter people adapt well to the technology side of things. There’s definitely a difference between the generations as far as that goes. There’s definitely a group of people who still like things the way they used to be, but it’s going to happen and it’s on its way. Mobile and internet are going to continue to grow, there’s no stopping that now.”
Brayan Garcia, Siemens
“We’re just going to have to start planning in the digital industry and farther ahead. Being in the digital industry means devices talking to each other, understanding when things are going to go wrong and being proactive. We want to get ahead of all potential problems.”
Tagged with 30 under 35, best practices