Storytelling and constant employee engagement are critical to culture

Storytelling and daily touchpoints help new employees integrate into your company culture. Gene Gray, President of Innovative-IDM, talks about the onboarding and continual employee engagement processes that help them deliver "legendary customer service."

Robin: Hello and welcome to this edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies. I am Robin Tooms, VP of Strategy at Savage Brands, and my guest today is Gene Gray, President at Innovative-IDM. So Gene, welcome to Brandonomics.

Gene: Thanks for having me, Robin.

Robin: Well Gene, your company is in industrial automations, which is interesting. However, what you really compete on and differentiate on is this idea of legendary customer service. And what I want to know is, how did you get your employees on board with that idea from day one?

Gene: The challenge with getting a new employee brought in to who we are and kind of how we roll as a company really is done in a couple of different ways. One, we do it in a daily meeting we call Hoopla – you know kind of a culture meeting – and the other is with an onboarding process that we call Lose Your Marbles.

Robin: Okay, that sounds very interesting. What is Lose Your Marbles?

Gene: Well, Lose Your Marbles is a name we give for a series of meetings or classes that all employees go through regardless. We bring them in, and we go through training that has to do with kind of the overall organization of the company, typical things that you might find, but we spend about 2 full days actually telling stories. And so we get together and I spend about a day – a full day and a half in that and other people come in and participate in that – but essentially we tell them stories of Innovative’s past: why we started the company, why we take care of each other, how we take care of customers, what Hoopla and our kickoff meeting is about, how we ended up with a buzzard as our mascot, so that they start to understand the family.

Robin: And that’s how they better internalize this idea of delivering service.

Gene: Sure, when you add that to the daily meetings that we have, they begin to understand how important and how serious we are about taking care of each other, taking care of our customers and improving the company.

Robin: Okay great, well thank you for sharing that Gene. Very interesting. This had been another edition of Brandonomics, an inside look at top brands and their marketing strategies.

 

Innovative-IDM is an industrial automation and controls company with distribution and manufacturing locations in both Dallas-Forth Worth and Houston, and with sales and field service technicians across the southern U.S. They are committed to legendary customer service. https://www.innovativeidm.com/