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...
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