Unprecedented times mean unprecedented concerns for staff members, and it’s up to leadership to address these concerns directly for the sake of employees.
A meat processing facility in Omaha was raided by federal immigration officials about two weeks ago. When they left, reports say that dozens of Glenn Valley Foods employees had been taken away. The same has happened in other industries, including construction and agriculture. While such incursions aren’t necessarily a new thing, many of the employers are saying the same thing: They had followed the rules.
The president of Glenn Valley Foods says that the company had used the government system created to check the immigration status of employees, E-Verify. The owner of a Florida roofing company said the same thing after employees of his company were also arrested and taken away. The lawyer for those employees says they have proper documentation.
While it would be easy to turn this article into something choosing a political side about the rightness or wrongness of what’s happened, and happening, that’s not what ProFood World is about. Our job is to bring you content that helps you in the industry to do your jobs better. Right now, there are people in your plants that are scared or nervous, maybe even wondering if they should show up for work. That got me thinking about a conversation I recently had with David Gray, CEO of FedUp Foods, the leading fermented beverage manufacturer in North America offering turnkey private labeling of organic functional RTD beverages. Additionally, he’s given many talks in various formats on the qualities of leadership.
To be clear, our conversation didn’t involve the aforementioned events at all. We had instead gotten together to talk about some of the headwinds facing private label manufacturers and what FedUp Foods has been doing to weather them. During our talk, Gray brought up how the world has recently had several black swan events—incredibly rare scenarios that have an extreme impact. Examples of such events would include 9/11, the housing bubble, and COVID-19. These have had a massive impact on the psyche of our society.
Gray said that people, whether consciously or not, are asking themselves questions like, “What's going to happen?” “Are we going to go to war?” “Are we going to have higher priced foods?” “How do we take care of our households?”
“These are all creating conflicts with just day-to-day living, and then that shows up when they come in to work,” he said. “You have people who gotta work on top of that other stuff.”
These concerns can weigh a person down, maybe causing them to lose sleep or be irritable with coworkers, or maybe both and more. However these worries may manifest, they ultimately result in an employee who isn’t working at their best. If it was a machine on the line not working at peak performance, you’d get it fixed. The question, then, is what can leadership do about it?
“As a CEO and leader,” Gray explained, “my job is to really create a sustainable environment… where people can come and have stability and growth, and at some level, clarity.”
David Gray is the CEO of FedUp Foods the leading fermented beverage manufacturer in North America offering turnkey private labeling of organic functional RTD beverages.FedUp Foods
Gray said that his leadership philosophy was learned at the feet of some “great former CEOs” that served as his mentors. That philosophy was derived from Jim Collins and his book Good to Great which introduced the “Stockdale Paradox”: the belief that every good-to-great company “must maintain unwavering faith that you can and will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties, and at the same time, have the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”
The crux of the idea is to directly address the issues impacting employees, and just because they may not voice those concerns doesn’t mean they aren’t there. Gray said that some level of emotional sensitivity or intuition is needed, but it goes a long way to creating a community, which is important.
As Gray put it, “We are isolated. We're silos. So, workforces have to create environments where community can exist. It takes good managers. It takes people that have techniques to get people to be seen and heard.”
There are many food and beverage plants where members of the staff are worried because they’ve seen or read the news about people arriving at work only for immigration officials to show up and take them away. There are many food and beverage plants where something like that isn’t a concern among the staff, but they still have worries. It would be easy to know what those were if, like machines on the line, staff had sensors attached to them that could detect their worries send them to a display for managers to see. So, managers have to become those sensors. Developing this skill may take some additional training or courses, or simply practice, but a staff member’s peace of mind will be worth it.
“We live in an anxious society that's even more anxious than in past years because we've got all this information coming at us whether we like or not,” said Gray. “People need to know that, hey, we may not have the answer, but this is the path that will work and we're going to get through it.”
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