Preferred Place To Work
McKinstry Co. rests solidly on the foundation of the quality employees that "are" the company. It is our employees who have given McKinstry the reputation of being the "Single Source Solution Provider".
Recognizing this, we acknowledge and empower the personal and professional development of our employees, equipping them to craft solutions that meet the current and future needs of our customers. This focus is what we refer to as the "Preferred Workplace Initiative".
The McKinstry Preferred Workplace Initiative is a company-wide effort aimed at creating and maintaining an environment within McKinstry that fosters positive,
collaborative, innovative, and enthusiastic work styles resulting in retention and attraction of employees that embrace these attributes as their own.
How do we maintain this Preferred Workplace status? McKinstry invests in training and development opportunities, rewards and recognition, communication, technological and process improvements, in addition to work environment enhancements for our employees.
Training and Development: Employee performance standards are challenging, but attainable. In an effort to better equip our employees to produce superior results, McKinstry offers numerous training and employee development opportunities. These range from new hire orientation training to college courses, from facilitated seminars to in-house mentoring programs and cross-training opportunities.
Rewards and Recognition: Just as important to equipping employees with the skills necessary to successfully complete their job, is recognizing and rewarding them for these successes. This can come in various forms, including recognition of specific employees via our monthly newsletter, awards presented at our annual meeting, informal celebrations, and monetary/performance-based incentives.
Technological Advancements: McKinstry takes pride in our position of being on the cutting edge of technology. We solicit the innovative approach for our day to day process improvements, while maintaining our vision of going the next step toward future technological advancements.
Process Improvements: McKinstry welcomes, and has come to rely on, diverse perspectives. By encouraging our employees to challenge our current processes, we have discovered and embraced numerous opportunities for improvement. An organization, comprised of one representative from each department, has been established with this one unified purpose in mind: to positively influence interdepartmental communication and processes.
Work Environment Enhancements: McKinstry is committed to creating a safe working environment for each of our employees and accomplishes this goal by providing both global (company-wide) and individual enhancements. We emphasize Harassment-Free Workplace Training, fostering open communication, and have created ergonomically designed work stations.
Participating in the various facets of this initiative has produced a renewed and contagious enthusiasm, an increased pride in the company and has further developed our already intelligent representatives.
Emphasizing employee opportunities is not a new phenomenon at McKinstry. Our research comparisons have also uncovered some of the truly positive aspects McKinstry already has to offer! The Association of Washington Businesses recently recognized this when they awarded McKinstry the 1999 Better Workplace Overall Winner Award.
We work hard, respect each other for our unique abilities and make it a priority to have fun while we're at it. This renewed emphasis can only mean benefits to our company, its customers and the communities in which we are involved.
The Association of Washington Business (AWB) created the Better Workplace Awards to recognize companies who have taken a leading role in creating safe working environments which enable employees to be their best. Companies can be nominated in three categories: Workplace Safety, Job Training and Advancement Programs and Innovative Benefit/Compensation Programs. Awards are presented at four levels - those with fewer than 25 employees, those with fewer than 100 employees, those with fewer than 250 employees and our category, those with 250 employees or more.
Nominations were submitted on behalf
of McKinstry in all three categories. Two weeks later we received a call
from AWB stating their judges unanimously decided we deserved to win in
EVERY category, but felt that was unfair to the competition. As a result,
they created a new award titled “Better Workplace Award Overall Winner
for 1999” to be given to McKinstry. Read the article here.
Representing McKinstry at the awards ceremony on December 15th was Dean
Allen, David Allen, Anne Kilcup, Mari Anderson, Karen Finnestad and Gary
Fadden.
