Plastics News Talks with Derrill Rice on Best Places To Work Recognition

When employees go above and beyond the call of duty at injection molder Plastic Components Inc., the company rewards them right on the spot.

Bonuses can be $100-$500 with “probably the largest one that I’ve signed off on is $1,000,” CEO Derrill Rice said.

For example, eight associates were willing to work overtime on the weekends if necessary.

“They just did it and never complained,” he said.

Even though the employees received overtime pay, they also got a $250 thank-you token of appreciation.

An employee who had been working for more than a year on a major multimillion-dollar program received a $1,000 recognition.

With 82 employees at its Germantown, Wis., facility, PCI ranks No. 11 on the 2019 Best Places to Work list. The company has made the list every year since 2014.

PCI recently added its service awards program for anniversaries, and employees are able to select a gift from a catalog. The employee is recognized at one of the quarterly town hall meetings.

Another award of acknowledgement that is given out is the Most Disgusting Refrigerator Award.

“People bring their food in, hopefully eat it or take it home at the end of the day, but there’s always some associates that have the tendency to forget that they brought some food in or didn’t eat it. … There is a special recognition for people who tend to create maybe an unhealthy condition in our refrigerator,” Rice said.

What’s the prize? “It’s just a Hall of Shame and a lot of attention,” Rice said with a laugh.

Rice said he has always held a commitment to continuous learning and individual development, and the leadership team is involved in a quarterly book club. The book they are reading now is “The Trust Edge: How Top Leaders Gain Faster Results, Deeper Relationships and a Stronger Bottom Line” by David Horsager, who was a speaker at the last Manufacturers Association for Plastics Processors conference.

“I don’t give anybody a test or anything, but we just have an open discussion about what we’ve learned from it and how it can help us be a more effective organization,” Rice said.

For career development and job opportunities for employees, PCI just finished its first year with a performance appraisal process in place. Training was at the end of 2017, and the process was deployed in 2018. At the beginning of the year, the company sets its total objectives. Then, departments put together their department objectives, followed by individual objectives.

“Every one of our associates has their own document that has their performance objectives for the year,” Rice said.

Goals can include anything from in-house training like RJG to developing leadership skills.

“What was exciting was once we did that, we underestimated how much interest there would be across the organization so we definitely blew our training budget for 2018,” he said. “We did not hold anybody back; it was just more successful than I expected. That will certainly be part of the process in 2019.”

At the end of 2018, Rice said, the incentive compensation plan was tied to both overall company objectives and individual performance as well as annual merit increase.

The company acquired Syracuse Plastics of North Carolina Inc. The deal was announced March 5. Terms were not disclosed.

Rice said PCI’s plans for the future are “to continue growing and continue to provide excellent engineered solutions for our customers and continue to build an environment where people are challenged, where people learn, where people are rewarded and where people have fun at the same time.”