ResponsibleBeef communication among employees. “We encourage every-one to describe what they’re doing to their fellow workers. In doing so, they learn their own area better, and the other employees learn too.” A more formal application of this concept is “Lunch and Learn,” a monthly event in which a department gives an overview of what they do to the whole company.

To get feedback on how these changes are working, the company has hired an independent firm to run an annual employee engagement survey.

communication initiativesAdams emphasizes the importance of communication with all employees and maintains an open-door policy. “We’re trying to make this a family,” he says. He stresses this out-look to every employee when he and Bill meet and interact with newly hired and current employees. “We share our vision for the company, and we get to know them,” Adams says. “We tell them they can come see us or call us any time.” He and Bill also have monthly birthday lunches for employees whose birthdays fall in that month.

Quarterly town hall meetings are for the entire company, though each audience is only about 30 people. (With more than 200 employees, that means they hold each meeting seven or eight times each quarter.) “We talk about what is going on from our level, but more importantly, we get interaction: We get questions and feedback. We need that,” Adams says. “And it seems that if you get more than 30 people in the room, people don’t ask questions or give feed-back.”

Every Monday morning, a meeting of managers and directors produces the week’s talking points. “Everyone explains what they’re going to do in the coming week,” Adams says. “We encourage supervisors to take that infor-mation and explain it to their reports so the whole organi-zation knows what different departments are doing.” Now these messages will also be communicated on new digital signs in break rooms, along with other company news and employee recognitions.

Some of those recognitions come from the weekly “Employee Department Spotlight” or the new “Nominate a Champion” program, in which anybody can nominate

A NebrAskA feedYArd builds A culture of emploYee eNgAgemeNt. they are adams

a fellow employee who demonstrates the company’s core values.

Several initiatives encourage bonding among employees too: The ADAMS Team is an internal branding committee that organizes activities — from beef cook-off competitions to coloring contests for the kids — for all employees and their families. On a departmental level, supervisors can use their allotted quarterly team-building funds on whatever they and their employees choose; some have attended hock-ey games together, arranged pizza parties or gone bowling. “It’s built around the idea of the supervisor spending time with employees,” Staples says. “It’s important for people to connect with each other, trust each other, like each other.”

Staples sees the signs that these new initiatives are working — they are developing a life of their own. “You can hear people talking about our code or saying, ‘We are ADAMS,’” he says. “We’re starting to see people better understanding what we do and why we do it.” The metrics, he says, will tell the rest of the story once they start coming in, when they start to see greater impact on the company’s ability to attract and retain talent.

Adams agrees that changes in attitude are the first sign of success and are already happening. “People are saying they understand more about the whole business, not just their area,” he says. “That’s what we want. It’s the employees that make this company — we want them to feel like part of the organization, part of the family.”

Let’s stand together atResponsibleBeef.com.Sponsored Editorial Content

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MANy CHANgeS Are uNderwAy at Adams Land and Cattle, and they all started with a vision statement from owners Jerry and Bill Adams. That vision was simple: “We are building our business, a company for generations to come.”

The company has already lasted for a couple of genera-tions: Jerry and Bill’s father started the business in 1950, when he bought 300 acres east of Broken Bow, Nebraska. Today Adams Land and Cattle has a capacity of 93,000 head there, as well as 40,000 head in other Nebraska lots and another 100,000 head backgrounding throughout the U.S. and Canada.

In August 2013, Jerry and Bill, who had been serving on the company’s board of directors, returned to day-to-day operations, and they arranged a retreat with company lead-ers. Out of that retreat came their vision statement, meant to convey that “this is not just for us or our employees, but our children and all our employees’ children and their grandchildren— the whole community,” Adams says. “We want to take this past us.”

They also came up with a theme — “We are ADAMS” — which now appears on hats and walls and is echoed throughout the company. “That means it’s all of us in the organization, not just the owners,” Adams says. “It’s all the employees.”

The retreat attendees also developed a mission, a code and five strategic imperatives to help realize the new vision. “Our overall goal was to improve employee engagement,” says Corey Staples, vice president of technology and tal-ent development. “We saw we had some opportunities in

communication and in talent development, so we put our biggest focus there. Good culture and people development can happen accidentally, but we wanted to put some inten-tionality around it.”

talent developmentOne result of the company’s focus on talent development was the creation of ADAMS University. The first of its three levels focuses on onboarding — making the process thorough and consistent. “We want to look at every job and create a curriculum,” Staples says. “We want someone hired today and someone hired six months from now for the same position to have the same onboarding.” The newly hired talent development coordinator will help take their process of onboarding from good to great, he adds.

The next level at ADAMS University is called “Emerg-ing Leaders,” and offers additional training for motivated employees in skills such as negotiating and situational lead-ership. This summer, a local community college will offer classes at the feedyard to teach some of those skills.

Those with their sights set on management-level posi-tions can move on to the “Advanced Leaders” level and learn from the company’s directors and vice presidents in a one-on-one setting. “They get into understanding the busi-ness in more depth — risk management, strategy develop-ment, crisis management,” Adams says. “If we’re going to manage this business for generations to come, we really need to focus on developing leaders.”

Another initiative in the talent development category is called “Teach and Mentor,” which promotes job-related

leArN moreAt adamslandandcattle.com

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Bill and Jerry adams continue their father’s business near Broken Bow, nebraska.