Drew Graham, the Director of Field Services at Love’s Travel Stops, was a recent guest on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series to share his insight on the intersection of sales, marketing, and technology. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Clark Buckner, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.
Drew joined Buckner to discuss how to engage 13,000 employees and still have a family run, business feel, as well as ways to use technology to better recruit, train, and facilitate the growth of your employees within your company.
Listen to the entire interview here. Below are a few highlights from our conversation:
TechnologyAdvice: Love’s has been able to keep and hold on to a family-owned atmosphere as a key part of the business. They’ve received the Gold Achiever status from Chief Learning Officer Magazine — tell us why that’s so important.
Drew: Love’s is a nationwide company that provides highway hospitality for the travelling public and over the road truck drivers. We have a lot of things under one roof: fuel, retail business, gasoline, commercial fueling and tire care for truck drivers, retail operations, and more. It’s a little more than your average convenience store, or a quick serving restaurant.
We’ve been awarded the designation as a learning elite organization. The application involves explaining what you do, your philosophy in terms of training and how you execute it, the way you look at it, and how much you invest. So the last three years we’ve been designated a learning elite organization, we’ve moved up the scale from 50th, to 43rd, to 35th this year. It’s essentially the gold standard, in terms of companies that hit on all the metrics they measure, so we’re real proud of it.
We actually have a pledge to our employees. The first ten lines of that pledge say we’ll do what’s right by our employees, by providing them exceptional training. We see this as an award which backs that up. We had to really expose all the things we do to prove that we’re a learning elite organization. We’re very thankful we received that recognition, and we think it speaks to our commitment to our employees and our culture. And at the end of the day, that’s how we deliver those clean places and friendly faces.
TA: In this type of industry, you’re going to have turnover. I had an interview with Kevin Kruse about employee engagement, and sometimes people just want a job — they don’t want a career. But if you have good leadership, you can validate and show employees that you want to help them be successful. Then they’re going to care so much more and who knows, they might want to turn that into a career because they feel like a part of that family.
Drew: We see that all the time. Most of our senior management has grown up through the ranks at Love’s. A large part of our middle and senior management has come from the store leadership positions.
And honestly, it’s because our team member success is actually the company’s success. The face of our company is our cashier, our tire techs, our restaurant cashiers, etc. So if they’re not successful on a one-on-one basis, then multiply that by 13,000 and the company can’t be successful. So our whole company has a very servant leadership, servant-minded mentality, and my role as Director of Field Services is to ensure those folks are successful every day in front of customers, and if there’s something that they need, we can make them successful.
TA: Are there any general insights that you can share on what the company’s relationship looks like with technology?
Drew: At Love’s we leverage technology to make the team member and the store management’s job easier. If they’re not successful, then we’re not taking care of customers, then the company is not successful. So it’s important that we leverage technology to make those interactions at store level successful, to reinforce the culture and training we have, and the engagement activities we have set up.
It’s not built to be something that we use to manage 13,000 employees at a time. It enables a store manager to engage the cashier, or the tire tech. So we leverage technology to help do that in a very distributed network across the country, and keep a consistent feel for our customers, and a consistent execution for our stores.
TA: How do you train employees and facilitate other activities to help raise them through the ranks?
Drew: Reliant is one technology partner we leverage for a variety of things, including our learning management system, as well as talent management system. They’re also a partner in the resources we leverage through this learning elite designation.
It’s this investment in technology that really makes the magic happen in our stores; it brings employee engagement about through training and talent management. This means we’re finding the right junior leaders, who turn into senior leaders by developing them and giving them experiences and tasks which grow them as professionals or individuals in our organization.
It also engages the cashiers and tire techs and the different folks that work throughout the company by ensuring they’re equipped with the right training to engage customers, because we feel that if you put someone in front of a customer — in a situation they’re uncomfortable or untrained for — it’s a recipe for disaster. So Reliant helps us deliver that training. We’re a people organization. People make Love’s successful, so we spend a lot of time focused on taking care of people.
Listen to the entire show above in order to hear our full conversation, or (download the show) to listen later. You can subscribe to the TA Expert Interview Series via Soundcloud, in order to get alerts about new episodes.
This podcast was created and published by TechnologyAdvice. Interview conducted by Clark Buckner.
