Case Study
Standard Meat Company has grown considerably since its humble beginnings in 1935. Almost 90 years later, the thriving company is still family-owned and operated across two facilities in the Dallas–Fort Worth area and employs nearly 800 people. But, with multiple locations, multiple shifts, and hundreds of people in the mix, keeping staff informed of company news and events is a constant challenge.
Communicating at scale
Collecting information from staff
Distributing time-sensitive announcements
Segmented text message announcements
Text message surveys to collect staff info
Dual language messaging options
Amber Ramirez is an HR Coordinator at Standard Meat. In that role, managing employee communications is a large part of her job. Part of her responsibilities includes gathering headcount for their frequent company events, such as their annual company picnic at Six Flags.
Before Team Engine, Amber says her process for collecting information from employees involved a lot of paper forms, tracking people down to complete those forms, and then manually logging that information into spreadsheets. It was a time-consuming, inefficient and never-ending process, since Standard Meat Company hosts company events regularly throughout the year.
Now, Amber uses Team Engine’s text-message survey feature to quickly and efficiently gather this information from employees.
Here’s how it works:
Meanwhile, the employee’s experience plays out like this:
As replies come in from employees, Amber can see the results in real time on the Team Engine dashboard, or she can download a spreadsheet to tally results and create charts for reporting.
Amber says Team Engine’s survey function is her favorite feature in the software because it enables her to connect with employees at scale, and gives everyone an equal opportunity to contribute to their culture.
Amber says they have a lot of fun employee competitions at Standard Meat Company. To keep it fresh and interesting, she sends out surveys to ask what type of competition they'd like to have.
When you’re dealing with a staff of 800+ like Amber is at Standard Meat Company, it can be just as hard to get information out to the staff as it is to collect it from them. And that challenge escalates exponentially when the information to get out is time-sensitive.
Before Team Engine, Amber says it was “all hands on deck” when they had to get a message out quickly, such as in the event of a weather-related factory closing.
"We would all grab a telephone, pull numbers off the system, and start calling. We wouldn’t be able to make contact with some of them, and we would run into language barriers with employees who don’t speak English. Sometimes we’d reach people, only to find out they were already on their way in for their shift and had to turn around."
Now, with Team Engine, Amber says, “As soon as we know the plant is closing, they know,” because in a matter of minutes, the message has been typed out and sent to all employees. And since the message is written out in a text (i.e. not spoken) they’ve also been able to eliminate language barriers on phone calls.
Amber says that Team Engine has allowed her (and by extension the entire HR department) to connect more meaningfully with employees. She says that it’s helped them to be better communicators, but it’s also encouraged more bottom-up communication as well, since employees don’t always have time in their workday to stop by HR. Likewise, Amber can’t spend her whole day on the production floor tracking down headcount for the next company event.
“It’s been an exciting process and lots of great learning seeing all the different ways we can use Team Engine to communicate with staff.”
Amber Ramirez
HR Coordinator, Standard Meat Company
Does your company frequently need to communicate a lot of information to a lot of employees at once? Take Amber’s advice and give Team Engine a try to see how our digital employee communication software can help you be more organized, timely and efficient with your staff communication.
