GABE GOTAY
Hello everyone. Welcome to Promo Perspectives Live, a new podcast brought to you by SAGE. We live stream it once a month with the goal of giving promotional products distributors tips, tricks, and perspectives on how to grow their business today. I am so pleased to be joined by Josh Ellis, publisher and editor-in-chief from PPAI. We’re going to be discussing the new “Greatest Companies to Work For” article that PPAI published earlier this week. We’ll talk about company culture, what makes a great company, and what it takes to make the list. Thank you so much for joining me Josh.
JOSH ELLIS
Gabe, I know I was a difficult booking, but I’m kidding. I actually like the show, so I’m glad to be here. You’re doing cool stuff.
GABE GOTAY
Well, thank you so much. You know, I’m glad our people were able to get together and make this happen.
JOSH
That’s right.
GABE GOTAY
Can you tell the audience a little bit about yourself and your role at PPAI before we get into the main topic?
JOSH ELLIS
Sure. I oversee our media department. I’ve been with PPAI for almost three years. The department has really grown and flourished with great support from our board and feedback from the members. We started with just editorial publications—a magazine and a newsletter. But the board, based on PPAI’s mission to be the voice of the industry, saw potential for the media department. So we’ve taken a more aggressive approach toward news and editorial, and we’ve also added research, governmental affairs, digital content, and social media. The team has grown a lot and is doing great work. I’m really proud of what we’ve done.
GABE GOTAY
I’ve definitely seen a lot of great things coming out of PPAI, and as far as the way it helps support your mission, let’s talk about the “Greatest Companies to Work For” article in particular. In what ways does this article help with that mission?
JOSH ELLIS
To go back to the board one more time, they are of course made up of representatives from the industry. So everything that PPAI sets as a goal is truly for the good of the industry. One of our strategic goals is economic sustainability and scalability, not just for PPAI itself, but also for the people whose businesses make up the promotional products marketplace. For economic sustainability and scalability, you have to have a strong staff. It’s absolutely in the mission of PPAI for the people who are going to carry on this industry forward to have an understanding of what makes a great culture, so people will want to come work there, stay working there, get better, learn the market more intimately, and do great work for their clients. This isn’t spelled out precisely in the organizational charter, but for me personally, I think the list is important because there is some movement of personnel in this industry. It’s really common for people to go to work for one company or another. Some people get into the promotional products industry and they’re lifers. But if they are going to change jobs, I like the idea that they’re using our list to vet their potential employers to know what they’re actually getting for themselves. So I think it supports not only the businesses but the employees. It’s a really important list for us.
GABE GOTAY
Raising up the industry; It’s the rising tide that raises all ships, right?
JOSH ELLIS
Absolutely. And there’s some competition for it, too. Companies discovered this with the PPAI 100, our other primary list. We didn’t think about it going in, but it’s really a feather in the cap for marketing for these companies. They can say, “We’re on PPAI 100, we’re one of the leading distributors or suppliers in the industry.” Or for “Greatest Companies to Work For,” they can say, “They’re all competing locally or nationally now that more companies have people working remotely. You need to be able to say those things. You need to be able to back up that your culture is strong, and if somebody comes to work for you, they’re not going to hate it.”
GABE GOTAY
How has that list … or let’s start with what are some of the key factors that go into making the list in the first place?
JOSH ELLIS
The “Greatest Companies to Work For” is structured so that you have to be nominated by an employee. Then the companies will give us their roster of all their talent. We’ll send them a 15-question survey. It’s been the same questionnaire since the list was first created in 2011. Some of the factors include questions like, “I’m confident about my future at this company,” “I’m paid fairly for the work I do,” and “I get recognition and praise for doing my job well.” These are things that are generally accepted by any employee or employer as pretty vital for them to love where they work. We score each company on all of these questions on a one-to-five scale, where one is “I strongly agree with this positive statement” and five is “I strongly disagree.” You see the cream rising to the top. You see some companies that do it better than others in this category or that category. Nobody’s perfect, but it’s a pretty comprehensive measure of what we think makes a great place to work.
GABE GOTAY
You say the questions have been the same now for over 10 years. But how has the actual definition of a great place to work changed in that time?
JOSH ELLIS
That’s a great question. I’ll give you the example of work-life balance. The question is, “I’m given the flexibility to manage my work and personal life.” Different people may have defined that differently pre-pandemic. I remember in 2019 and the first two and a half months of 2020, work-life balance to me meant that I worked from 8:30 to 5:30 or 9:00 to 6:00, and then I was able to kind of unplug in the evening or on the weekends. A lot of people were probably closer to that definition then. We weren’t even though we were carrying around potentially work on our phones. Most of us weren’t blending work and life to the extent that we do now that we’re all more used to working from home.
Work-life balance to me now is a totally different definition. I’m okay with doing some things at night or on the weekends, maybe not all weekend or all night, but I am happier to marry those two together because I’m not commuting to the office every day. PPAI is on a hybrid schedule, so the office, three days a week, is my house. And also if I’m willing to do those things on the evenings or on the weekend then I’m okay with asking the boss to let me take a doctor’s appointment at 9:00 because that’s when I can get in, or let me do lunch at my kids’ school, things like that. So I really think that’s a great example of how the definition has evolved over time. It’s a personal definition and not the same for everybody, but it does happen. And I still think that the factors, even though they’re going on 15 years old, are pretty pretty eternal. People employees want to be paid well, whether it’s 2011 or 2024. These things are going to be with us for the long haul.
GABE GOTAY
Well, and you talk about the flexibility of remote or hybrid work. Obviously, that’s a big topic now in the last couple years since the pandemic. It’s not everything, so it’s not all we’re going to talk about, but I do want to ask about that a little more in particular. You mentioned that being on some of these lists is great for the marketing department or the recruitment department of a company. Offering that kind of flexibility of remote or hybrid work is also one of those feathers in the cap these days, right? What role does that take in being competitive to getting top talent?
JOSH ELLIS
I think if you want the better Millennial employees, Gen Z employees, it’s become a must-have to a certain extent. We all got used to things over the course of 2020 and 2021. I didn’t want to go back to the office. Even though I enjoy the work and enjoy my co-workers, I don’t like driving in. For me, it’s a 50-minute commute, and that stinks. I don’t want to do that, even though there are great podcasts to listen to. I think that’s pretty universal among this generation. And as time goes on, this generation, the next generation, is only a bigger and bigger part of the workforce. They already make up the biggest share, and they are in fact the leaders that you should be developing in your companies. So if you’re old school, I understand why the opportunity for collaboration when people are working together in the office is very real. There are ways that it’s much easier done in person than via teams or Google Meets or whatever. But I just think that you need to offer both if you can. Obviously, in this industry, there are some roles where it just will never make sense to be able to work from home. So I wouldn’t say it’s a one-size-fits-all for everybody. But there is competition for talent, and that has always been the case and always will be the case. So I think that you’ve got to strongly consider it if it’s not already your policy.
GABE GOTAY
And like you said, there are some roles that just it doesn’t work out for. You and I at PPAI and SAGE, we’re a little more laptop bound than maybe some of these people who are embroidering or decorating or making physical products.
JOSH ELLIS
Yeah, and that’s what I mean. I understand there are some roles that will just never be able to work from home. I understand why, but there are other opportunities that come from remote work. You can hire a team that isn’t bound to a 10-mile radius of your facility. That might allow you to hire more affordable employees or do work with partners overseas. The talent is just as good but may come at a cheaper price. A lot of distributors are exploring that right now, and there are some solution providers in the industry that are doing that. I just think when you’re limited to who’s willing to drive to your office, especially in different parts of the country, that could be a challenge for you. That could limit your growth.
GABE GOTAY
I know it’s true for us here in the Dallas Metroplex. Some of our most talented people here at SAGE. The producer of our podcast is coming in from Rockwall. Our social media person comes in from Fort Worth. If they had to come up here 5 days a week, I just don’t know that we’d get them.
JOSH ELLIS
Yeah, and I remember after the pandemic, there was a movement that productivity was down and inflation was up, and these CEOs were all going to make everybody come back in. Some companies have done that, and I think there’s a long-tail effect that you’ll find on whether that was a good idea or not. The productivity of a company can be difficult to gauge. You may see a short-term uptick, but as talent leaves, it may not be as sustainable as you would hope.
GABE GOTAY
Well, and we get to see how this is going to play out with some of these companies that are trying to bring people back. A lot of them are huge companies, like some of the bigger tech Silicon Valley or Seattle-based companies. For them, they can almost afford to do this experiment and lose a couple of hundred people if they decide they don’t want to do it. But this kind of gets into the next thing I wanted to talk about, which is the sizes of the companies in the promo industry tend to be much much smaller than those kinds of companies. Your list itself is broken into different size categories. So what role does the size of an organization play, not just into remote work, but company culture in general?
JOSH ELLIS
Those companies in the tech industry that you’re talking about have to make up for it in other ways, too. The Silicon Valley employee is paid a lot more than the one that you’d be hiring out of Louisiana to do the exact same job. So there are trade-offs that leadership has to make. In the promo industry, while the questions may be the same, the challenges are a little bit different. For a small company, if you’ve only got five or six employees, the smallest company on our list only has five employees, everybody needs to be a little bit of a jack of all trades. Going back to the work-life balance issue, sometimes somebody’s kid’s going to get sick and they’re going to have to stay home. Well, we need to be able to make do without that person, so four of us can handle their work while they’re out. In that way, training is really important.
On the other hand, at a really large company, whether it’s a Silicon Valley company or the largest companies on our list, we have some in the hundreds and one over 1200. You may have people in more specialized roles where they don’t need to know everything. But in that case, they need to not feel like they’re just a small fish in a big pond. They need to understand that there are some opportunities to grow and develop. If you want them to stay if they’re good, you have to create the leadership development opportunities to put those people on a path to promotions and things like that.
There are different challenges at different-sized companies. But this is why leadership is a thing that so many of us study, myself and a lot of the distributors who are listening to this right now. It’s just interesting. It’s not easy anywhere, because you’re involving people and they’re unpredictable. And also, you owe it to them to give them the opportunity to thrive. So there are different challenges at different companies, but it’s an interesting challenge for management anyway.
GABE GOTAY
Absolutely. Well something I liked about this year’s list – which again is available now, came out earlier this week, so if you want to go take a look you it’s on ppai.org/media – this year, not only did you include an article that explains some of the philosophy and thought behind it, but you also included a lot of company details and bio information. I think this is super useful because you can’t just look at the score, see who made the company, and make some sudden drastic change in your own. When you have this context of how all these different companies exist and operate in their different sizes, it gives you more ideas on how you can integrate some things into your own company culture.
JOSH ELLIS
The thing that stands out to me when you look at the 106 companies on the list is that this is a record number for us this year. I take that to mean that more companies in the industry are taking company culture and the importance of a happy workforce seriously. And this is that feather in the cap for them.
But when you look at the responses from all of them, you see some perks like, “We got a pickleball court and we play in a volleyball league,” but that’s a one-off from this company or that company. The thing that you see more as a trend across all of them, large and small, is strong 401(k) plans, good dental and medical insurance. These are the relatively basic benefits that most people need. If those are strong, then the pickleball court can come second.
Every company has their own HR situations to manage and navigate. They need to find what’s best for them. But it’s obviously another thing that businesses, not just in the promotional products industry, but in your local area or nationally, compete on.
GABE GOTAY
So like we kind of talked about, people who are just reading this list can get a lot of great insights on ways to improve their own company culture. But for the people on the list themselves, it can be a great learning opportunity because I understand you provide them with a lot of information from the surveys.
JOSH ELLIS
Yeah, so when I arrived it was really considered like a data-gathering project. Because the department was about publishing. We would get the list, put it in the magazine, and that was great. It got attention and was good for the companies. But now what excites me about the way we’ve evolved the department and brought in research is thinking about how we can use this information to make these companies better.
So, it’s an anonymized survey right? I’m not going to give away any individual employees’ answers; that’s very important to me and PPAI, but we will be able to share the results for each company for all 15 questions so that they can understand their strengths and weaknesses. For example, “We’re good in this area, let’s keep it up, but we need to bump up our pay ranges.” Or, “Do I have the right tools to do my job well? Maybe we can invest in getting people the right software.”
So yes we will be able to share that information as well as individual employee open ended essay response, where you get even more information from them. Just as long as their response doesn’t give away who they are, then we feel like that’s appropriate to share with management at the companies, so that they can do a better job. The employees will ultimately get – hopefully – something a little bit more toward the cultures that they enjoy. And in a lot of cases, it’s just “I love my boss, we’re going a great job as a team.” and as managers it’s often a thankless role. You need that too. If you’re the owner of a distributor, especially a small one – a typical industry distributor, just a few employees – you’re working your butt off. And so being able to hear from the people that you’re doing it with and for, that they’re proud of what they do and believe in you, that makes all the difference for those people too. And so we’re excited to be able to share all that stuff with the people who participated.
GABE GOTAY
Well, you’re absolutely correct on it being thankless. So I just want to take a moment to say thank you to Rebecca Brown for being one of the best managers that I’ve ever had.
You mentioned that there were a record number of people on the list this year. I noticed when I was doing research on previous years’ lists that it did grow every year. I’m kind of curious about the philosophy behind not making it a top 10 or top 100 and just letting it grow as big as it’ll grow when people meet the benchmark.
JOSH ELLIS
Yeah, it comes with challenges to have this thing grow every year. In the magazine, we have like 36 pages devoted to this article this year. That might be the thing that we find a way to cut back on, the print space because it’s a lot to manage. But I think that companies that are doing the right thing should be rewarded. There would be a thin line between number 10 and number 11. I don’t want this list to be something that people lie to get on or because their bonus is tied to inclusion on the list. I want this to serve a purpose: to make these workplace cultures better. You can do that through recognizing companies that are doing it the right way. If you only have five employees, you can look at what other companies with only five employees are doing right. Or if you have a thousand employees, you can look at those with a thousand and emulate some of the things that work well for them. Benchmarking is a big part of all of our research, and this is ultimately now a research project.
GABE GOTAY
I assume there were more than 106 people who applied or had surveys filled out. Do you send feedback and results to the people that didn’t make the list as well?
JOSH ELLIS
Yes, we do. Companies that didn’t make the list for whatever reason often have a small percentage of employees who are really unhappy. Management knows to listen to those. But if most of your employees graded you a one or a two, “I agree” or “I strongly agree with this positive statement,” and enough of them are just upset or have a valid beef and graded you four or five, then that skews the weighting quite a bit. That’s usually the case when a company doesn’t make it. You have some folks who are a minority of the workforce but who are really unhappy. You’ve got to think about those people, too, whether that can be a salvaged relationship or not, or what you need to do from a management perspective to correct it.
There are also cases where the participation level in the surveys wasn’t high enough. Sometimes people are just overs surveyed. You can’t pick up a frosty from Wendy’s without being asked to take a survey. People who aren’t energized about what they’re doing are probably just more apt to archive that email. Or if they’re busy, maybe you have a workplace where people just have too much work to do. Well, something like my survey is not going to be top of the list.
So those are the reasons why people wouldn’t make it. Yes, we share the same feedback with them as well that was received from their employees.
GABE GOTAY
You talk about that small contingent of unhappy employees will tend to rate really negatively on these survey questions. Does that go both ways? Do you tend to see most responses are either overwhelmingly positive or overwhelmingly negative, or is there a fair amount of middle ground ranking going on, too?
JOSH ELLIS
Most people have a majority of their 15 responses overwhelmingly one way or the other, and then there will be a couple of questions that are the other direction. Not every company is great at everything, and sometimes you have to make those trade-offs that I mentioned earlier. Are we going to be a nimble culture or are we going to have great collaboration like agile versus collaboration? It’s hard to do both, so you’ll see both across companies and individually. Usually, there are people who see some gray area, but for the most part, they like their companies, and that’s just a natural part of it.
GABE GOTAY
Like we talked about, it’s going to be different for every company of every size and every culture. But just generally speaking, maybe based on trends you’ve seen over the years or this year, if a company just sits down and asks the question, “What can I do to make this list?” Where do you suggest they start?
JOSH ELLIS
Do all the right things, right?
GABE GOTAY
That’s it?
JOSH ELLIS
Yeah, I think it’s prioritizing your people. We only ask that an employee nominates you, not that ownership nominates you. So that employee could be in marketing or HR, and there are valid reasons why both departments would want the results. HR because they’re going to get feedback on how their teams are feeling, marketing because it’s the opportunity to share some positivity about the company. But it’s worth doing for anybody. I don’t care if there are 206 companies next year, and it is more work for the team, but it’s better for the people in the promotional products industry.
We were talking at the beginning of the conversation about younger generations that are in the workforce, and you and I are in those younger generations. I hope to stick around in this industry for the entirety of my career, and I want management to understand the uniqueness of these people and what challenges they have. They’re coming of age. They want to buy a house, they have student loans that were through the roof compared to a generation before, maybe, and so they want work-life balance to have that family. They need to be paid fairly or else they’ll leave, and as an association on behalf of the industry, we need the best people to stay.
GABE GOTAY
We appreciate the list, and Josh, really, first of all, I appreciate you coming on the show today, and we really know the industry is grateful for all of the resources that PPAI provides. We got to wrap up here, but real quick, I just wanted to ask, you know, this is a great list. You have the top 100. I’ve interviewed Colette about the social media list. Are there any other resources that you’d like to plug from PPAI that our audience might find useful?
JOSH ELLIS
Yeah, thank you. We talked a lot today about how this list is not just a publications thing anymore. This is data gathering, it’s research, and that is a bigger and bigger part of what our my team and PPAI is contributing to the industry, content and information, timely, accurate information. And where all that stuff is housed is on our premium research, ppa.org/premiumresearch, which is different than it used to be. It’s a new website, right, but that research is only available to our professional tier members, the silver, gold, and platinum tier members, and those those memberships are more expensive, right? So not they won’t make sense for everybody, and every distributor supplier should choose the PPAI membership that’s right for them. But this sort of data, there’s a lot of it out there that that we’re creating through the premium research section of our site, and I want people to see it, and I want people to make use of it so that they can benefit their business, they can benefit their employees. I think it’s a great opportunity, and I just want to see people take advantage of it.
GABE GOTAY
Well, everybody, you heard that, go ahead and check out PPAI’s premium research. Thanks again, Josh, for joining. Thanks everybody for listening in. Remember, you can catch this podcast anywhere that you stream podcasts, Spotify, Apple, iHeartRadio. Also, make sure to keep an eye out for the invite to the next live stream on September 25th, where we’re going to be talking about how to break into the sports promo world. Thank you all for joining, and thanks, Josh, for coming in.