AICC Roundtable (CONT’D FROM PAGE 20)
Board Converting NEWS INTERNET DIRECTORY
energy costs. It’s not a bad thing. They took out the capacity to control the market, to control the prices. It is a supplier-driven increase, not a demand. And demand-driven increases are much easier to get through the marketplace. Supplier-driven increases are much more difficult. You’ve got to be much more dili- gent in communicating with your customers. Morelli: There’s a lot of challenge right now going on in terms of the workforce. What are some examples of ways to attract, train and engage employees? Wagner: We’ve done some little creative things. For in- stance, we work less days per week now. We run 4-day shifts and 3-day shifts. People wanted that in the plant, so we provided it. One less day to sit in traffic, put gas in your car, commute. We do a daily production bonus that’s tied to safety, quality, and productivity, so they’re more engaged and they have their hands on the wheel and they get to drive to their destiny every day. And we do a lot of extensive cross-training. If you’re running a load former, you need to learn how to drive a forklift, you need to learn how to run the mainline bander, you need to know how to tend to the baler. And all these little things that they learn when you try to cross-train the people to pick up extra skill, they make more money. So, they’re encouraged to cross-train, and then they get paid more so I have many operators in the plant that can operate almost every machine we own. Schaefer: We’re in an urban market, and we have seen the quality of candidates improve since COVID. But we really had to revamp how we train and develop people. We have a conversation regularly that we’re not in the box business as much as we’re in the people development business, because without them we can’t produce the boxes. We’ve had to really look at our internal training systems and how we’re bringing people along in order to be suc- cessful. And it’s never enough, it’s never fast enough, but we’re certainly head and shoulders above where we were after the end of COVID when our talent pool was rough because of the available labor pool and being too busy to appropriately train people. Morelli: Training employees is oftentimes time-con- suming. How do you balance that versus getting product out the door? How do you weigh that internally in terms of an ROI? Tucker: Not properly training your staff is similar to not doing maintenance. You don’t run to fail, right? If you run to failure, you don’t keep your customer very happy. Well, it’s the same with people. You don’t want to run to fail with people. You want to continue to build and build and build Grossbard: We took two different routes, one for the plant, one for the office. In the plant, we used temp-to-hire to get the people in. In the office, we used job fairs. We
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22 May 4, 2026
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