What began as an effort to recruit and retain employees at Spudnik Equipment Company would eventually result in a “Top Workplaces Industry” national recognition for the Blackfoot manufacturer this year.

Rainer Borgmann, Spudnik CEO, said that during the COVID pandemic, the company struggled to find new employees and to determine why they hired Energage, an employee survey company, to determine job satisfaction and measures the company might take to not only recruit new employees but to retain current employees.

“From 2019 to 2023, we really struggled to get employees,” he said.

Borgmann said that they chose Energage because their methodology has been developed and standardized through years of surveys.

“Every company that engages with them gets the same questions. So you truly can compare nationally what employees feel about their employers,” said Borgmann.

Bob Helbig, media partnerships director for Energage, said that they survey roughly 8,000 companies nationwide annually, and the “Top Workplaces” recognition is given to companies that exceed benchmarks on employee feedback.

“As a company, we focus entirely on surveying people about their workplace experience,” Helbig said.

Helbig said that the standard employee response rate is 35%, but the Spudnik employee response rate was 66%.

“Well above the threshold,” he said.

Borgmann said that employee responses to the survey pointed to two areas that the company immediately addressed: pay and communications.

“The biggest wake-up was pay,” he said. “They (employees) felt like we are not paying to the benchmark that is existing out here. Another big one was communication. They didn’t feel like they were involved enough.”

Borgmann said that they now have benchmark pay for every job description, and the company has promised to bring all jobs up to current benchmark pay levels within three years.

He said that prior to COVID, they had had quarterly meetings with the workers, but during the pandemic, management had decided to eliminate the quarterly sessions.

The survey had shown that the company underestimated the importance and appreciation that employees placed on the quarterly updates from Borgmann.

In addition, the company sends out a weekly email updating employees on five things that happened that week.

“We believe that if you take care of your people first, they will take care of you,” Borgmann said. “That has been our philosophy. We employ and develop people and supply them with the resources and environment they need to succeed.”

The company’s investment in its employees’ future development includes offering tuition reimbursement of up to $5,000 for classes related to work advancement.

Bill Barrus has been employed at Spudnik for over 35 years. During that time, he has worked in five different departments. Today, he works as a licensed electrician, but he started in the paint department and moved to fabrication and welding and service repair and assembly.

Eventually, he took advantage of the tuition reimbursement program to get his electrical license at Idaho State University.

“I found that if I worked hard and cared about what I’ve done, that it was certainly a benefit for both myself and the company because it didn’t go unrecognized,” said Barrus.

Barrus said that through all the economic ups and downs over 35 years, the company “valued me enough to keep me working, and I find that just terrific that they value me.”

Six years ago, Fabian Pelayo started work as a parts puller in the Spudnik stockroom. Today, he is the stockroom supervisor.

“I feel like for me, in my journey, I felt like they’ve been very helpful,” he said. “It’s still hard, you know, to get to where you want to go, and they make it really easy here.”

Pelayo said that Spudnik encourages workers to set goals for themselves.

“If they see that you want to put in the work, they’ll work with you, they’ll help you, they’ll invest in your education. They’ll invest into you to get you where you need to be, and that’s why they have a ton of people that have been here 10,15, 35, 50 years,” Pelayo said.

Borgmann said that in a niche manufacturing industry such as potato and sugar beet equipment, which Spudnik specializes in, it’s important to retain employees whom the company has invested training time to develop.

“To build up an employee, that takes five years,” he said, “that they have a certain understanding of our machinery, and if we can promote those people from within and they can grow, that is always preferred versus hiring from the outside and they have no idea what our processes, what our culture are, what we expect.”