SSA president Tony Kenney has served within Marathon OilSSA's corporate parentfor 34 years. Vice president of operations, Glenn Plumby, has nearly 30 years under his belt. Grant Heminger, vice president of marketing, has been a part of the family for 20 years. And C.R. "Rich" Rough, vice president [image-nocss] of human resources and training, will celebrate 35 years with Marathon this June.
While lifelong careers are not uncommon in a major oil company, for SSA, they are the inevitable side effect of its people-first philosophy.
"I'm proud we as a company have always found a way to treat our employees right, to do the right thing by our people," Kenney said in an exclusive interview with CSP Daily News. "We're fortunate that over tough times we have not had to do anything drastic in terms of laying people off. To be fair to people, to treat them with dignity and respect, to create a safe work environmentThose are responsibilities I take very seriously."
[Click here to view an exclusive CSPTV interview with SSA's Tony Kenney.]
SSA's magnetic pull can also be credited to an embrace of cross-training. Plumby and Heminger, for example, assumed new roles this past January.
"This company is an outstanding place to work and develop," said Plumby. "I'm an accountant and have an MBA in business. I was in operations, marketing, light products. This company offers you the opportunity to spread your wings, see other disciplines, and it's just a very exciting atmosphere."
A willingness to learn new thingsand in some cases, travelis all that separates an SSA employee from a new role within the company. And it's a philosophy embraced at multiple levels. For example, SSA rotates its category managers every 18 to 24 months.
"We value our employees, and cross-training is an important aspect of employee development," said Rough. "By exposing employees to different jobs in different areas of the company, we help complete and 'round out' their education in terms of our retail model as a whole. This helps employees see the bigger picture of our business and how each area impacts the end result. This also makes each employee more valuable to current managers and to the future of SSA."
An online internal job posting system lets employees view currently vacant positions and apply for areas that interest them.
While SSA declined to share turnover figures, the retailer attempts to prevent any poor fits with a focus on centralized hiring and, once someone joins the team, constant communication.
SSA has 37 recruitment centers that currently handle hiring for 1,000 of its 1,600 stores. The head of each recruitment center must spend one day each week in one of the stores he or she oversees to stay in touch with store-level demands. Store managers can decline a hire, but this has become increasingly rare as the recruitment team has proven its mettle. The result, beyond freeing up store managers from this time-intensive task, is greater consistency in the quality of employees. Rough said it has also impacted SSA's applicant-to-hire ratio "quite dramatically."
In addition to cross-training opportunities, competitive pay and benefitsincluding tuition reimbursementform SSA's overall package.
Each new hire goes through extensive computer-based and hands-on training in the daily operations of the business. "When a new initiative is rolled out, we utilize many outlets to communicate with our employeese-mail, regular mail, CBTs, online message boards and newsstands, even an internal company video news magazine," Rough said. "We also place great confidence in the chain-of-command. As such, many of our programs are supported via guiding the messages shared with associates through our managers and supervisors."
And for a large c-store retailer, SSA considers the structure of this chain-of-command very lean. "We're very thin; we don't have a lot of layers, so we're very connected to the street," said Plumby. "That's what makes it so fun: You're constantly competing with the guy across the street to get that customer on a daily basis."
To learn more about the secrets behind SSA's competitive prowess, check out the March issue of CSP magazine.(See related story on Speedway SuperAmerica's new recycling program in this issue of CSP Daily News.)
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