CEO Don Flow on Being A Good Neighbor to Employees (Video)

CEO Don Flow lays out the ways his company acts as a good neighbor for its employees.

Transcript:

We set up a fund where we pay for the college education of all the children of our employees. We’ve sent hundreds and hundreds to college along the way because we’ve said, “How can we invest in their families?” And as I tell a lot of our guys that I hired when they were out of high school and starting out, “Now I probably couldn’t hire your children, because the level of education required to work on cars is much higher than it used to be. So for your kids to have the same kind of opportunities you’ve had, college really matters. In technical degrees, at least, it really matters.” So there would be an example of us reinvesting back into our folks.

We also have an employee emergency fund that is democratically elected and managers can’t be on it. If people have personal emergencies, they apply and we give grants. People don’t realize that, hey, if I have a parent that lives on the West Coast and something happens, and they get on a plane the next day, it’s two thousand dollars. So we just fund that.

We do all these kinds of programs that internally got developed. When health care costs really went crazy and people’s deductibles went up a lot, we said, “Look, people can’t afford these deductibles. What do we do about that?” So we put together a fund that they can borrow against. They can take it out over 12 months, no interest charge, instead of having to pay a deductible. We said, “That just doesn’t work for folks.”

We say, “We never want you to miss anything your children do. Their football, baseball, ballet, band: you’re there. If we’re not good enough as a company to manage so you can be gone for two hours, something is wrong with us as a company.

I work hard, and I work a fair amount of hours, but then when I’m done, I’m done, and I really try to be engaged with my family all the way.

Watch the full film Driving Trust from Seattle Pacific University.

This video serves as an illustration to the TOW Bible Commentary article Treating Workers Fairly (Leviticus 19:13).