Throughout his five years at Hershey Canada, David Plamondon felt a solid connection with the company. But that feeling grew even stronger when the director of manufacturing in Canada received an unexpected phone call in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The call was from Jason Reiman, a top executive of the Pennsylvaniabased confectionary giant. The chief supply chain officer wanted to know how Plamondon was personally coping with the stresses of the pandemic, and how his family was doing.
“What makes me feel good about Hershey is that we work for a multinational, but you don’t feel like you are working for a multinational, because we’re connected,” Plamondon says of the company, which has 17,000 workers at manufacturing plants and offices around the world.
Plamondon, director of manufacturing, Canadian sites, says he’s responsible for about 600 employees at Hershey’s two Canadian plants – in Saint-Hyacinthe and Granby, Que. – but he doesn’t feel like he’s seen as merely a manager asked to manufacture and ship products at the best cost.
“I really felt at that time that they really cared about me as a person as well,” Plamondon says of Reiman’s call.
The chocolate and snacks maker, founded about 125 years ago by confectioner and philanthropist Milton Hershey, has always promoted values including togetherness, integrity and making a difference.
Regarding the first goal, Plamondon has tried to duplicate the attention he gets from his managers to the people who report to him. He does that through such things as one-on-one meetings at least every two weeks. Two-way communication allows managers to understand employees and “leverage their strengths,” he says.
The way the company generates a sense of belonging is a real differentiator, says Houssam “Sam” Chehabeddine, Hershey Canada’s overall general manager. “We do act and feel like a united family,” he says.
The executive, who works out of the Canadian head office in Mississauga, Ont., had experience at several large companies in markets around the world before starting at Hershey in Dubai in 2015. He says not many places have “the same sense of genuine care and family feel.”
“People support each other,” Chehabeddine says. “There’s a lot of collaboration, a lot of responsibility by the team, a lot of resilience, but most of all caring for each other.”
He points to other important initiatives that enhance the worker experience. Hershey runs an employee-recognition program called Smiles, and promotes diversity in all forms (for instance, about 60 per cent of the Canada leadership team is female, along with the chairman/chief executive officer). It also continues to sponsor charitable events to support underprivileged youth, extending a legacy started in the early 20th century by the company founder at the Milton Hershey School in Pennsylvania.
Chehabeddine says the company’s emphasis on togetherness has helped keep the workforce strong amid the pandemic. That means really listening to their needs and frustrations, and sometimes even over-communicating.
“COVID has been difficult,” he says. “There has been a lot to digest, and people needed to feel that they are supported and we really care for them. So that also translates into a lot of empowerment and trust.”
Plamondon says that emphasis on caring extends to giving workers flexibility and time off during the COVID-19 crisis to deal with family issues. Managers also let people work from home as much as possible and promoted the idea that Hershey Canada employees should be able to balance life and work “without feeling guilty.”
“That’s what I like about Hershey,” Plamondon says. “They always make the person the first priority. I think that makes a big difference.”
