Vantaggi
-Employees come here and stay for decades. Lots of institutional knowledge. Strong pride in the brands of each division. Deseret, South Valley, AgriNorthwest, Berberian Nut,
-People come here because they want to work in a place where people treat each other with respect and who want to do that as well. Leaders care about their people's non-work life, their family, and their personal challenges.
-Roles have broad opportunity to make an impact. Organization is flat, not multiple people/teams overlapping and doing redundant work on the same problems.
-Heavy focus on people development. Proactive effort to plan and prepare people for future positions.
-I'm LDS, but most employees of AgReserves are not - despite its ownership structure. The company really tries hard to not make what somebody does on Sunday have any bearing on what they do the rest of the week. Other than a blessing on the food at a Christmas Dinner, which would be normal at any of the companies in the agriculture world, there is an intentional effort to not make religion an issue at work. I've seen people decide to participate in LDS church activities who seemed to think it would impact chances at a raise or promotion. In hiring decisions, promotion decisions, and pay decisions - I've never seen that be a factor in anyway. We want to hire the most highly skilled people with strong values of honesty, integrity, hard work, and eagerness to learn - regardless of what they do or don't do on Sunday.
Svantaggi
AgReserves is comprised of 4 separate and very different industries/commodities. There are very real, practical differences that require unique approaches to running each type of business and unique approaches to supporting them as HR, Finance, IT, Legal. A successful leader within one of those functional areas needs to be able figure out the sweet spot between corporate standardization and local adaptation. Support staff who ignore the differences and attempt to apply cookie cutter approaches will be less successful. People who have to receive permission for any variance or adaptation, or who can’t distinguish between when they can flex versus when not can feel frustrated and bogged down.
Understanding California requirements with regards to Employment Practices and other areas is helpful as the company often seeks to implement them across the board rather than have multiple processes to accommodate state by state differences. For support functions, its important to think in terms of how to make an initiative work across the industries of each of the separate divisions.
Learning how to share feedback with Senior Leadership in a way that is authentic but reasonable is important. Since many top leaders come from outside the industries the company is engaged in, it is important to share information with them that they might not be aware of, but in a way that doesn’t fail to appreciate the value they bring to the table.
The company is seeking to be a good place to work for any qualified candidate regardless of their race, gender, orientation, or beliefs. In the process, sometime people are hired or promoted that don’t have the traditionally expected backgrounds for a given role. Sometimes it matters, but often in Senior roles, it doesn’t matter as much as people think. I came from the Silicon Valley world of Intel, AMD, HP – and the company took a chance on me that I could be successful in the Cattle industry. 10 years later and it seems that it worked!