March Madness basketball shootouts, Super Bowl dish cook-offs, potlucks for holidays, family-inclusive company picnics, dress-up days and cornhole tournaments are just some of the countless entertaining and engaging activities offered to the 128 employees at Chase Plastics Services Inc.
"We hosted last weekend a Saturday night movie event at our office for all the families," Kevin Chase, president of Clarkston, Mich.-based Chase Plastics Services, said during a February phone interview. "We're always doing something. A couple weeks ago, we did an escape room that everyone went to. We do a lot of engagement stuff."
Chase Plastics presents a wide variety of awards to its employees, including the Clarkston Award for the seller with the highest gross trading profit; the Mary Mier award, named after a former controller, to the most quietly effective leader; and the Million-Dollar Award for the sellers that grow more than $1 million in a given year.
Rewards of $100-$2,000 are given to those who go above and beyond to provide exceptional customer service or to those who consistently display the company's core values. There's also recognition for birthdays and work anniversaries.
The resin distributor celebrated its 25th anniversary in 2017, complete with a party-filled team-building weekend in Grand Rapids.
Chase Plastics' company culture is its "foundation of our professional livelihood," Chase said, who added that he's a "big believer" in author Jim Collins of "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap and Others Don't."
"What is the common theme that truly great organizations have? And one of the baseline themes that they have is they have a core ideology," Chase said. "In our case, our core ideology and our purpose is to provide world-class service to our customers and suppliers; it's as simple as that. And to do that, we have our core values that we're based off of, which are high expectations, independence, teamwork, execution and character."
Chase said the company only submits the Best Places to Work survey every other year because they take the feedback seriously and use the results to improve their scores the next time around.
"I'll look at [the results] with human resources — each line item — and try to address it to the best of our ability," Chase said. "But then this year, based on President [Donald] Trump's tax cut, we gave everyone a $1,250 bonus and doubled the 401(k) match. That was right after the tax cut was approved. Companies like ourselves are going to do pretty good with this tax cut, and so we wanted to give a portion of it back to the team."
Chase Plastics has announced an 80,000-square-foot expansion of its South Bend, Ind., warehouse, which is expected to be completed this fall and will result in 205,000 square feet total. Chase also has its sights set on achieving $320 million in sales by 2020 and $500 million by 2025.
"What makes us great is that we're a vehicle," Kevin Chase said. "We're like a vehicle for them — for our team — to achieve their professional success, which then drives their personal success. What separates us is our No. 1 asset, which is our people. When you bring all of these team members together and they're all focused as a team on one approach, which is driving Chase Plastics' profitability and growth, then they know they're going to be successfully rewarded for that."
