By Kristen Harper, Controller and HR Manager and Kassie Lyons, Accounting Specialist at Kenton Brothers.
This year at Kenton Brothers, we’re investing in our employees to become better humans. That’s a lofty goal so we’re breaking it down a bite at a time
At the beginning of 2019, the staff at Kenton Brothers starting a 10-month training program with Joe Calhoon with a focus on customer service and leadership. Joe has worked directly with Stephen Covey, author of teaching “7 Habits” and “Principle-Centered Leadership” and specializes in working with businesses of all sizes to build their customer service skills and teach a community servant mentality to all organizations.
Strengths Assessment
We starting the training with every employee taking a Clifton Strengths assessment. Joe helped us understand how our strengths make everyone uniquely qualified to serve. We also learned how understanding our coworkers’ strengths will help us communicate better with each other internally.
People who focus on using their strengths are three times as likely to have an excellent quality of life and six times as likely to be engaged in their work.
One of the key attributes that Joe has been teaching Kenton Brothers is that in ‘doing service’ people are happier. By giving remarkable service to our customer, our customer is happier and is better able to serve their customer. We reap the benefits of knowing we have done our job well.
The Power of Training
By doing this training, Kenton Brothers is not only wanting our staff to work better with our customers, but also to be able to have better positive relationships with everyone in our lives both inside and outside of the workplace. Joe taught us through personal stories and illustrations that have made him relatable to our entire team.
Additionally, our management team is working through Emotional Intelligence evaluations. This specifically helps each individual understand where they need to improve upon different emotional strengths and how to help them better evaluate problem solving, lead staff and support the organization as a whole.
Kenton Brothers is deeming this insightful training of our people our best investment ever as it is creating a stronger culture, forcing us all to look deeper into the meaning of what we do and how we communicate with each other for the overall goal of proving the best experience possible to our customers.
Thank you to Joe, as he is a living example of what he teaches and we’re a better team thanks to him!
You might have heard that we’re a dog friendly workplace. Recently, we decided to expand that to being a chicken-friendly work place. Mollie Porter, a Project Administrator at Kenton Brothers Systems for Security, decided to bring Silkie chickens into her a life as a potential 4-H project for her son. When her kiddo didn’t have as much interest as she’d hoped, the chickens became family pets that were kept around for eggs (each hen produces one egg per day) and snuggles.
