Focusing on employees is a top priority at Jubitz Travel Center in Portland, Oregon, and the company was rewarded for its efforts with a 2018 Top Workplaces honor from The Oregonian newspaper. NATSO sat down with Tom Faricy, director of people services at Jubitz Corp., to learn more about how the company keeps its employees front and center.
Question: How do you foster good relationships with your employees?
Answer: Jubitz has been in business for a little over 65 years and we still remain a private family-owned business. Right from the get go one of our foundational missions is taking great care of our employees. We realize that if we want to provide great customer service, then we need to make sure we’re being great employers because that will support the employees then wanting to provide great service to the customers.
Question: What programs do you have in place to engage employees?
Answer: Because we do place a large emphasis on customer service, we have built in some great programs and rewards for our employees when they do a great job and provide great customer service or provide great internal service to each other. When things go well, everyone on the team wins.
The first and biggest program is our cash program. We approach customer service from a team perspective. We have a comment card system to collect comments—both the good ones and the bad ones. Whenever we go 30 days without an avoidable bad comment card, every single employee in the company gets $50 cash.
What that does is it not only inspires the employees to make sure they don’t cause an avoidable bad customer comment card, but as they’re walking through other departments and see another department busy or shorthanded, they’re inspired to jump in and help when they can because we’re all in this together. It isn’t a system where you say, ‘It is their fault.’ We’re all in this together and we all succeed together. The program has been remarkably successful.
If we do have an avoidable bad comment card, there is a setback. We don’t go back to day zero. On average, we’re paying out a full-time employee around here about $600 a year in cash. The other benefit is that it pays out often enough that the employees continue to be invested in it.
Question: Can you tell us more about avoidable bad comment cards?
Answer: Let’s say we get a really bad comment card because someonethinkswe’rechargingtoo much for our burgers, that isn’t the employee’s fault.
Question: Are there additional ways you encourage employees?
AAnswer: We recognize all of the employees who get comments from the customer. We print up a list of every single employee who is mentioned for giving great service.
Also, employees can give each other Employee 10s. It is like an employee giving another employee a comment card and we probably have 20 to 30 a month where employees are recognizing each other for great work.
We do a drawing each month from all of the names that came in from the customers and employees, and one person gets $100 each month. That is a big deal for employees. They want to get as many comment cards as they can because it increases their odds of getting $100.
Question: How you you decribe your workplace culture and how do you cultivate it?
Answer: We spend a lot of time on culture. Back in the mid-2000s, the Fox Channel did a show on top truckstops and visited Jubitz. They named us the world’s classiest truckstop. Our leaders at the time, who are still here, said, ‘You know, that’s really who we’ve been trying to be all of these years, so why don’t we embrace that as the foundation of our culture?’
That is how we came up with our saying ‘world-class customer experiences,’ and we want to continue to become the world’s classiest truckstop. We built the theme from the customer service perspective and let it grow out of that, but that is the foundational stake of it all.
Every time the leader of our company talks to us, he reminds us that at Jubitz we have three top priorities: provide world-class customer service, value and validate our employees and provide a reasonable return to our owner. Everyone knows those things are the three most important and everything we do supports that.
Question: Where do you find quality employees?
Answer: In this business, that is one of the No. 1 challenges especially these days with such low unemployment rates. We have placed a large emphasis on trying to keep our turnover numbers low and improve retention because there is not a bottomless pool of employees out there. We can’t take for granted that if something doesn’t work out with one of our employees that there will be someone to take their place.
When we advertise, we try to make sure our job postings look really good. We want to let them know if they come to work here, they’ll be treated well.
We try to make sure we’re very fair in our pay practices and are paying competitively. We have a profit sharing plan and try to show people the value.
We’ve really placed a focus on making sure that our mangers are people who understand that to run a successful department, they have to be supportive managers who are good atteachingpeopleskillsandhelping them through their problems. We work very hard to make sure we don’t have jerk managers. Nothing can drag a department down quicker than a jerk manager who people don’t want to work for especially if they’re new.
We try to make sure we’re hiring managers who are good managers and supervisors of others. That means holding people accountable also. We don’t want our best employees to suffer because another employee is doing something they shouldn’t. It is walking a fine line of being helpful but not letting a problem employee wear on the good employees.
We also have a nice employee referral bonus. If an employee refers another person and that person makes it through the 90-day introductory period, our employee who refered them gets a check for $300. We gross that out so it is $300 even, so taxes are grossed up and accounted for.
When hiring, we cast a wide net. We put in a good applicant checking system that posts to Glassdoor, Indeed and a couple of others. We post on Craigslist and post on a few specialty sites. We find even when we try to target our advertising, most are coming in from Indeed or Craigslist.
// NATSO Truckstop and Travel Plaza New Hire Orientation and Training Guidebook. Employees are at the heart of every truckstop and travel plaza operation, but finding and keeping quality staff can be a time-consuming and challenging process. To help truckstops succeed, NATSO released an updated employee handbook. Learn more and buy a copy at www.natso.com/newhire.
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