Innovation

Walbec Group companies provide professional construction and engineering services and produce quality construction materials in Southeastern Wisconsin. What started out as a family company’s desire to do good while doing well has become a signature element of the company, a career high point experience of the human resources manager, and a collaborative private-public statewide response to employment development.

In the late 1980’s, three forces converged: 1) company leaders had a deep family value and commitment to living wage employment and family success of minorities; 2) fewer young people with farming/farm machinery backgrounds led to a growing workforce shortage for the company; and 3) other employers and state government were searching for new workforce solutions.

Feeling deep passion and corporate responsibility to reach out to engage people from diverse background, Walbec’s early solo response was a Milwaukee inner-city outreach effort, intending to attract under-employed people to company employment. Gradually, leaders learned a lot about the power of relationships and partnership. “In the early days,” says Dawn Pratt, human resources manager, “we’d go to inner-city pastors and organizations to get our name out. This was a shotgun approach with only limited success. Over time, we learned to pick our partner agencies so we could develop better relationships.” As these relationships developed, the scale of employment development initiatives started to grow, as did the collaborative approaches to them. Walbec became a leading influence in numerous regional efforts, including WRTP/Big Step and Wisconsin’s DOT Transportation Alliance for New Solutions program.

Inspiration

Then CEO, Ned Bechthold, had a goal to benefit a community by giving back in a way that also benefits the company. He wanted people to become aware of the opportunities before them so they could move into the work force and have a career.

As the current CEO, Kurt Bechthold, tells the story of the initiative’s start in the late 1980’s, “We needed to find a dependable base of entry level employees. We were transitioning from typically hiring farm people to hiring city people, often from the inner-city where unemployment was high. So, we started some targeted outreach efforts in the inner-city.” These outreach efforts—a bit random at first—became a passion for Dawn Pratt, the HR manager. Over the years, company efforts became much more focused, more community agency-centered, more collaborative, and more recently focused on shaping employment development strategy statewide. These efforts kept Walbec Group in the spotlight and helped educate people to come to work for the company, while simultaneously impacting policy.

Discussing the impetus for this initiative led to some powerful insights from leaders:

 “If you care about people as individuals, you’ll get to these UN SDGs.” “Every day I ask myself, ‘Am I treating people as human beings?’”

 “We are creating an environment to release the potential of our employees.”

 “Profit comes when you serve multiple purposes—your own AND somebody else’s.”

 “If we tried to do it ourselves, we would probably fall short.”

Overall impact

The company exceeds federal compliance goals in minority hiring. Continuous outreach efforts throughout southeastern Wisconsin are most effective where minority populations are concentrated. There, company recruitment success of minority employees has reached percentages as high as 35%. Beyond a simple hiring “head count,” Walbec tracks employee hours worked to verify that all hires are getting equal opportunity to earn wages.

Turnover is low (less than 25%) even in these last several years when workforce retention has been a problem. Given the travel required and the seasonal nature of the work, human resource executives are pleased with the retention rate. the. Pratt notes success beyond the company. “When some minority employees decide to leave the company, they often go work for a building construction company that is more hourly-structured and offers work for the entire year. While a loss for us, it is still a success for the construction industry.”

Referrals are now much broader. Resulting from this sustained effort is an expansive outreach from current employee referrals and, increasingly, word-of-mouth referrals from community-based organizations. Both reflect that the Walbec Group has earned a reputation in non-traditional areas as a good, solid place to work. Company executives and community-based organization leaders both see this as a true asset that removes barriers to employment. While company officials humbly point out that a single company can only do so much, Pratt notes her pride in “steadily and efficiently building a workforce that is diversified and brings value to our company. Everyone wins.”

Business benefit

Pratt points first to the internal benefit of this initiative fulfilling Ned Bechthold’s vision of removing inequalities. Both she and the current CEO see a number of cascading benefits to the business. It helped fill the pipeline of new employees. Beyond those incremental gains are some powerful benefits that both contribute to and reflect corporate culture: additional respect of government partners and community-based organizations; notoriety; a diverse workforce; “and an opportunity to teach our traditionally male-dominated, white, farm-based workforce that others with very different backgrounds can succeed here.”

Pratt expresses a deep pride in her employer for the commitment to this diversity employment and career-building initiative. She receives appreciative phone calls from families of people who’ve been given an opportunity to work at Walbec. For this human relations professional that feedback is an enormous sense of personal and corporate pride.

Similarly, Kurt Bechthold sees huge benefit in watching an executive who had been given great latitude to develop a program do so in such an impassioned way that it has created a solid source of company morale. Looking back on the program, he states that it’s a long process that requires dedication and “it requires a deep sense of caring for individuals. You have to have a process or context for working with the people to have real opportunity, not just a paper opportunity. I surround myself with people who care as deeply as I do. If you take care of the people, the business takes care of itself.”

Social and environmental benefit

Bechthold points to this program has having directly helped address unemployment in the central city. “By our moving in this direction in the 1990’s, it helped shine a light and create a dialogue about hiring within the central city,” he says. He points to a “multiplier effect” from the media coverage of Walbec’s (and, later, partners’) efforts. The many newspaper articles and TV news reporting at the time created momentum for what he calls “the bigger dialogue.”

He believes that as Millennials transition into management positions, many of them will adopt visions like this one because Millennials are profiling as more collaborative and inclusive. The result, Bechthold predicts, is that there will be greater diversity and inclusion in the workplace. People can openly be who they are (inclusion). We will see more people who don’t look, act, or think like us today. All the differences will be welcome. He lifts up a key learning from this program: “The company has to stand for more than making a buck…and if you do, you’ll make two bucks. The more diverse opinions you get, the more success you achieve.”

He believes this focused employment effort could easily be replicated outside Walbec Group. “If so, it has to be supported from the top and it has to be placed in the hands of someone with genuine passion. Companies need to understand that there’s so much more to today’s business than product and profit.”

Interviews

Kurt Bechthold, CEO

Dawn Pratt, Director of Human Resources