Bacon: What Dreams and Top 100 Companies are Made Of
There are so many reasons to love working for Camden. The dancing, the hugging, the unexpected year-end bonuses….
The bacon…
And finally, management conferences in Hawaii…
I know it hasn’t been announced yet, but I’m sure our next conference will be in Hawaii. It’s no coincidence that this year’s ACE tagline is “Catch the Wave.”
Based on last year’s conference it’s the only reasonable conclusion…
For those of you who weren’t there it went like this…
Every year at the end of the conference we are asked to fill out a survey. The survey asks what you like best and least about the conference and what you would like to see at future conferences.
Last year our President, Keith Oden, shared with us the eye opening results from the 2010 conference survey.
When our Vice President of Human Resources, Cindy Scharringhausen, saw the results of the survey she was quite disturbed. Apparently Camden had failed to execute a perfect conference experience. Of the 415 surveys received, there were 162 that were not completely satisfied. Cindy takes customer satisfaction very seriously and knew that our leadership would want to know the terrible truth.
One hundred sixty-two dissatisfied Camden employees were heard that day…
In a single voice they had pointed out a glaring oversight…
We hadn’t had any bacon.
That’s right….No bacon.
How could they possibly expect to continue to be number seven on the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For list when their employees were starved for bacon?
The truth stung. But our leadership always learns from their mistakes.
So last year Keith made good on his pledge to “fix bacon.”
We had bacon at every meal. That’s right. We had bacon at breakfast, bacon at lunch and bacon at dinner.
When the conference was over, we all picked up our boxed lunches and got on busses to the airport. As the busses began to pull away we got one last reminder of why Camden isn’t just one of the best companies to work for, but THE best company to work for. We opened our lunches to find the usual sandwich, chips, apple, cookie and you guessed it…
More bacon!
To Camden bacon is so much more than the delicious fried fatty part of the pig.
It’s leadership listening.
It’s leadership caring about the details.
It’s leadership altering the course just because we asked them to.
So if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to be number seven on the FORTUNE 100 Best Companies to Work For list, I can tell you. It’s dancing, hugging, the occasional year-end bonus, leadership that really cares about their people…
and lots of bacon.
Camden employees are smart, so at the end of the conference when we were once again presented with the opportunity to complete a survey, we knew what we had to do. Now that the bacon issue was resolved we knew it was time to mobilize around an even greater cause…
So this year, if all went to plan, we will be having our annual management conference in Hawaii.
It’s your move, Keith.
Now I realize it will cost considerably more to “fix Hawaii” than it did to “fix bacon.”
So if it comes down to Hawaii or one of those nice bonuses we sometimes get, I think we can probably stand Texas one more year…
But we’ll need a hug…
And more bacon.
Read Full Post »
).
