27 min watch with captions and full transcript
In addition to advice on getting your fingernails dirty and staying curious, you’ll also learn:
Danna’s take? A company whose values anchor its decisions means change can only be a good thing.
“We believe in wanting people who are curious not just because you need it to be competitively well-positioned in the industry, but because that's who we are as a company.”
“If you do yourself what you expect of others, then others certainly follow.”
DEBRA COREY: Hi there. I'm Debra Corey and I am the co-author of Build It: Rebel Playbook for Employee Engagement. I'm really excited to be here today with Danna Szwed from Ashley Furniture.
DANNA SZWED: That's right.
DEBRA COREY: Yes, it's a great brand in the U.S. Thank you so much for joining us today. You spoke at the conference.
DANNA SZWED: Yes.
DEBRA COREY: I loved it so much that I think I chased after you after you did your speak ... Speech and said, "Could you please come and have a little chat with us?"
DANNA SZWED: That's right.
DEBRA COREY: I appreciate that.
DANNA SZWED: My pleasure.
DEBRA COREY: In-between running other places.
DANNA SZWED: That's right.
DEBRA COREY: Do you want to tell people a little bit about your company?
DANNA SZWED: Sure, I'd be delighted to talk about Ashley Furniture. First of all let me say I'm new to the Ashley family, a little over a year. Then in Ashley context that really is a baby because folks at Ashley have been around for a really long time, the 10 year is fantastic so probably when I'm about at the 10 year mark I can say that I actually have some 10 year there. So relatively new to the company and so when folks say to me, "What was the appeal? Why did you join Ashley?" I think they might be thinking of some of the core basics that you see anywhere on a website. It's, "We're the number one manufacturer of furniture in the world," or, "We're the number one retailer of furniture in the world," or, "Almost 30 thousand employees globally and growing every single year as we expand our customer base and expand our product line and transform how we do business."
Sure those were all important considerations, but it was the culture. It was the culture at Ashley that just compelled me to join. It was such a visibile, strong culture. The minute I stepped onto the floor during the interview process-
DEBRA COREY: Really, you could feel it?
DANNA SZWED: I could absolutely feel it.
DEBRA COREY: Wow.
DANNA SZWED: That this place is different. As I've gotten to know the company, as I've gotten to know the people it's absolutely the case. That culture that we have is unlike nothing I've ever seen before so as an HR practitioner, obviously that's something that you dream of and so I feel very fortunate to be leading the HR function for such an extraordinary company.
DEBRA COREY: We were talking earlier, it really is the starting point, especially in HR, because if you want to go out and do all these great programs you need to have that basis, that culture, that purpose, the mission, the values, really to build on from there.
DANNA SZWED: Absolutely. One of the things that occurs to me, and we've talked a lot about this internally, is when you're, for example, here at the conference that we're at this week and you hear people talking about all of their various programs that they're trying to build, and where a lot of people are struggling is this feeling that they don't have anything to anchor that around. Company's not clear on its mission or its values or what they stand for, philanthropy efforts and, what is there role relative to the community? Our problem, if I can say, or opportunity, is exactly the opposite where we are very grounded. Very, very grounded in our core values, in our growth values. So we've got two different sets. The core values are the pieces that bind us all the way along and then the growth values are what we're going to use as our compass as we're continuing to grow the business, and these don't change. So interestingly enough, while the business is going through the 14th transformation in the company's history-
DEBRA COREY: 14? Wow.
DANNA SZWED: Yes, and we're going through one right now. While the world around us is constantly changing and our behavior will change depending on what it is that we're striving for, those core and growth values are what anchor us to make those decisions as we're moving forward. What's fantastic is we live and breathe our culture through our storytelling and it's like nothing I've seen before, it's wonderful to watch. Our founder Ron Wanek, our CEO Todd Wanek, and all of the leadership and employees who've been there for a very long time, everyone has their stories. We spend a tremendous amount of time talking about those stories and we link them back. We have things like Wanek-isms where, "Never pay tuition twice," or ... It's lot of different Wanek-isms, in fact we've written a book-
DEBRA COREY: Fantastic.
DANNA SZWED: ... to highlight what all of our Wanek-isms are, how we link them back to our core and growth values.
DEBRA COREY: What is a Wanek-ism?
DANNA SZWED: A Wanek-ism could be, "Never pay ..." There's so many of them it's hard to iron one out. It can be, "Never pay tuition twice." And so the premise of that is, we want to learn through the mistakes that others have made, right?
DEBRA COREY: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
DANNA SZWED: So we're a very curious company. One of our core beliefs is that we've got to be continuously improving. We've got to be curious as individuals. We've got to have a dirty fingernails approach where we go out and see for ourselves-
DEBRA COREY: Is that an actual value? Dirty fingernails?
DANNA SZWED: It is one of our core values, we are a-
DEBRA COREY: That is a new one.
DANNA SZWED: ... dirty fingernails organization and that is simply saying, "Don't sit in your office relying on reports to tell you the state of the union."
DEBRA COREY: I love it.
DANNA SZWED: "Get out there. Go find out. Be curious. Learn from others where they've made their mistakes so you don't make the same mistakes that they've made."
DEBRA COREY: That's great, and storytelling is such a rich way to do that. A lot of organizations really miss out on that and as you said there's so many great stories, why not get out there and share them?
DANNA SZWED: Absolutely.
DEBRA COREY: Do you have any suggestions for people on how to do that since you do it so well?
DANNA SZWED: I have to say it all starts at the top. The reason why we are a company with strong values and strong storytelling is because that's how we've always been, since the day one. We can really thank the Wanek family for understanding the importance of it and spending the time and making that a part of every single thing that we do. You can't go to an event, you can't be at a meeting without hearing a story, and that's just who we are.
DEBRA COREY: And you've continued it as the company grew because you said that it started very small. A family business? How did it all begin?
DANNA SZWED: The story all begins with Ron Wanek and again growing up on a farm and deciding that he was going to try something different. Had a love of furniture and started off in a very small furniture manufacturing organization and loved it. Put in the hard work and, traditional career progression story, and decided at one point that he was going to give it a try running his own business and then growing the business. The story takes off from there but it was just this curiosity.
We have a moment in our company, one of our stories, and it was called ... It's the 1982 Moment where Ron Wanek goes into one of our markets. He's very proudly presenting his occasional tables that he built and when he looked around and saw what the competition was bringing in was just as pretty, was just as good of a quality but was selling for a fraction of the price point, it was at that moment that he began to understand the implications of globalization and how companies were now using locations off-shore to be able to make an equally strong product but at a much cheaper price point. And he didn't know anything about globalization. He didn't know anything about how to dip his toe into that space. So he took a group of people with him and he flew overseas and he learned and he found a way.
DEBRA COREY: That epitomizes the mindset in your company, because I know you spoke about some other advances that you're doing. You have to always be curious and not to be afraid to move forward, especially in your industry, and it sounds like you guys are doing a lot. You're going to have another moment soon probably, won't you?
DANNA SZWED: We absolutely will and it's ... Again, when I think about it from an HR perspective and we think about topics like learning agility, which sometimes people will scratch their head and go, "There's another crazy HR word." It just simply means the ability of knowing what to do when you don't know what to do. Taking from your past experiences and, can you reflect and learn from those and apply them to future unknown situations? We believe in that. We believe in wanting people who are curious not just because you need it to be competitively well-positioned in the industry, but because that's who we are as a company. Even if we're number one, you don't stay number one by doing nothing.
DEBRA COREY: Yeah, we've got examples of companies who haven't moved on so, yes.
DANNA SZWED: That's exactly right. Our owners remind us of this every single day, that if you stand you're actually regressing. You have to be continuing to move froward not just professionally but personally, with how you're developing yourself. What are you reading? What podcasts are you listening to? What are you doing to improve your own self personally and professionally? This is something that we value, is we want people who are curious.
DEBRA COREY: It sounds like it starts from the top also which is in some organizations, when it doesn't work, it's because their leaders don't embrace it. It sounds like it definitely starts from the top and filters all the way down. How do you get your leaders to embrace it? You've got your owner doing it but what about the rest of the leaders?
DANNA SZWED: I think there's a lot to the saying of, "You lead by example." If you do yourself what you expect of others, then others certainly follow. I have to be very honest, I always prided myself on being someone who did relatively well staying abreast of benchmarking in the industry and keeping myself up to date. Coming into the Ashley family suddenly I felt like I wasn't even remotely doing enough because everyday Todd would be talking about a podcast that he saw or would be sending an article and another peer would be sending an article and, "This is what I've learned," and, "What about this?" Suddenly I felt quite insignificant, and I'm competitive by nature, and all of these people around me were doing all of this great work and exposing all of this wonderful insight in terms of what was going on in other companies or industries. It was just compelling me to say, "I need to be contributing more. I expect more from myself."
So I found myself doing even more than what I had previously done before. I think that's a lot of it is you take the lead through example, and when it's something that is happening over and over and over again, you know it's not something that's just a passing flutter, it's here to stay.
DEBRA COREY: What I like also is that you said that they're tapping you on the shoulder with this information, these are business leaders sending information on HR. It just shows the commitment to your people that they're interested if they're listening to those podcasts.
DANNA SZWED: Yeah, and what I would say it ... How I would respond to that is, the way I think of myself is I am a business person who just happens to have a background in HR. So as we're all communicating and sharing information it is really from any perspective, so I am just as quick to pass along something that I'm seeing from a business trend point of view or something on the HR side. I'll have a colleague, who just the other day, passed through an article to me about millennials and, "How do we attract and keep the millennials?"
I think our perspective is we all are there to run the business and so we're all expected to be knowledgeable about that and to be able to comment on all of that. Certainly we can rely on our experts in their resounding fields to be able to talk about it in more detail, but I need to know what's going on in manufacturing, I need to know what's going on in distribution and retail and legal because I'm a part of the executive committee, and of course that's an expectation.
DEBRA COREY: That's such a refreshing change. I've been working in HR for a very long time and being able to see that linkage and that connectiveness between business and the technical functions ... We talk about the blur between work and home life and we're seeing the same blur between business and HR and finance, and we really get to all play in one big sandpit now.
DANNA SZWED: Absolutely, and I will say when I think about how Todd runs his company it is absolutely with that expectation. All ideas are good ideas and worth considering. And this idea of continuous improvement is a core value that threads throughout the entire company because at the end of that day it's the customer experience that drives whether or not we get the right to stay in business, and we all are responsible for that experience.
DEBRA COREY: And you're all customers too which helps.
DANNA SZWED: And we're all customers as well, but we have to think about how it all fits together in the very large supply chain side of, "What can we personally do to make for a better customer experience?" We've reflected on that a lot in HR as an example and our job is to make sure that we are easy to do business with so we can free up the time for the business to go focus on the customer and delight her in a way that causes for her to be a raving fan and refer us to everybody she knows.
DEBRA COREY: Another thing that you talked about was what your company gives back, which has that definite link to purpose, mission, values, and makes people a part of the organization. Could you talk a little bit about that?
DANNA SZWED: Yes, I would be very happy to talk about that-
DEBRA COREY: Great.
DANNA SZWED: ... because I don't think we talk enough about it. I think some of that is just culturally a part of who we are. A lot of the Midwestern work ethic is you put your head down and you work real hard and the results speak for themselves, you don't need to be braggy about what your accomplishments are. I respect that a lot. Having said that, people join organizations because of what the organization represents. They want to be a part of something that's bigger than just a profit line. What I learned very quickly at Ashley is how serious we take this. We are often in very small communities, particularly with our manufacturing and our distribution centers, and oftentimes we might be ... The size of our organization might be just as big if not bigger than the size of the actual city itself-
DEBRA COREY: Wow, that's responsibility.
DANNA SZWED: And so we take that responsibility very seriously and we do it in a couple of different ways. There's something that we call, "The positive balance of trade." What that means is we will employ a certain amount of employees in the United States and as a result of that there's taxes we pay on those employees, there's electricity that we use. There's a certain amount of direct expenses that will contribute a certain amount to the economy, I think it's about 2.5 billion on any given year, just because of those employees that we provide support for. But it's the ripple effect that is outstanding. For every one manufacturing job that we create in the United States, it creates this ripple effect of creating another 3.4 jobs.
DEBRA COREY: Wow.
DANNA SZWED: That could be in the form of suppliers. That could be in the form of ... In these towns that we're in, we need to fill up our gas tanks, we need to eat lunch, we need to pick up supplies on our way home, and it has this spillover effect that has this exponential value, I think it's about 11.5 billion a year. We take that very seriously so when we say, "Part of our mission statement is to stay in business and make a profit," it goes beyond just the almighty dollar. It's because we have a responsibility and we take it very seriously that families depend on us, the economy depends on us, and we can't let that down. It's our responsibility to make sure that we're growing that to the extent that we can so we can continue to positively contribute to the economy.
The second piece would be your traditional philanthropy efforts that you would expect. Some of them are small. One of my favorite ones that just goes so overlooked but for me I find it very symbolic, is every day on Arbor Day every employee gets a small tree to plant in their yard or whatever. So when you think about the symbolism there of, "We want to give respect back to the earth because on any given year we're consuming wood from the earth to make our product and so we feel that it's equally important to make sure that we're giving back that of which we consume." I think that is terrific-
DEBRA COREY: That is.
DANNA SZWED: And it is incredibly environmental friendly. And we don't talk about it. We don't even announce it. My first Arbor Day a tree shows up and I say, "What's this?" So I learn about the story and I said, "This is fantastic. We should absolutely be talking about this."
DEBRA COREY: Definitely, big pictures of all of you with your trees.
DANNA SZWED: Absolutely.
DEBRA COREY: I just think it goes back again to the purpose. There's other companies out there that do similar things, and I never even knew that you did this, but I think it's something that your employees get behind. Do they have collections of trees then in their garden if they work there 20 years?
DANNA SZWED: I guess it depends where you plant your tree but I certainly put mine in my backyard and look forward to the next one and the next one.
Just another example too of something that I think is just absolutely wonderful is ... It's wonderful in the fact that we are trying to make a positive impact ... The fact of the matter is there are too many, one is too many, children who don't have their own bed to sleep in. For some they're sharing a bed with siblings or they're sleeping on the floor. We believe that every child has the right to have a strong, childhood development and getting a good night's sleep is a very big part of that, so we've donated over 40 thousand mattresses to kids who otherwise would have had to share a bed or not have a bed to sleep in. Again, when I take a step back and I think about how we've changed the lives forever of those kids, it's very powerful.
Our company is very military minded and in Arcadia, Wisconsin where we're headquartered, we have a memorial walk that was funded by our organization where people can walk through and they can see and honor and acknowledge people in the area who have fought and who have served our country. It's a way to be able to recognize that and we're a big supporter of veteran [inaudible 00:19:24], but we don't go out and talk about it.
DEBRA COREY: But you said it's your culture-
DANNA SZWED: We just do it.
DEBRA COREY: It's just who you are.
DANNA SZWED: We just do it.
DEBRA COREY: But your employees all know about it which is the most important thing.
DANNA SZWED: They do, and having come from other companies and other industries people, they want to talk about that, "Look at all we do for military veterans and their families. Look at us, here's what we do. Aren't we great?" And we don't do that. We just hire them because it's the right thing to do. They need our cultural values and we welcome them and with open arms.
DEBRA COREY: What I love about all your programs, and it's really important because we were talking about ... You can't just go to one of these conferences if you can't read a book or you can't do this and then just take everything ... Everything that you explained works so perfectly in your company. It circles around your whole purpose and your mission but it won't work in another company, they have to figure out what's going to work for them.
DANNA SZWED: Agreed. I think part of what I realized being here this week at the conference is, who you are as a company is who you are as a company. It's like the DNA of an individual. We have a set of culture and core values and beliefs that are very strong and are very real to us, but it's very different than some of the other companies that we heard from this week and so I think my message, to myself and others is, you can't and you shouldn't force fit.
DEBRA COREY: I agree.
DANNA SZWED: You are who you are and you have to embrace what that means and capitalize on those strengths. Make sure that you're sharing that story with everyone because what you want is to attract those that want to work in that culture and environment. When you can do that, nothing is impossible.
DEBRA COREY: No, I think it's a perfect way to end, getting everybody optimistic. I've really enjoyed this, it's inspired me. I will put my company filter on and take your ideas, filter it to work in my company, and hopefully it'll inspire some other people. Thank you very much for that, I really appreciate it.
DANNA SZWED: Thank you for the opportunity.
DEBRA COREY: If you would like to hear more stories like this we've got lots of them in our book. It's Build It: The Rebel Playbook. Also, we've got more videos. We've got lots of free content if you just want to get inspired with reading a different report, watching some different videos, some podcasts, whatever it is to help you with your engagement journey. That is on rebelplaybook.com. Good luck with your employee engagement journey.
Last but not least, don't forget to be a little bit of a rebel. Thank you.
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