Summary:

In this episode of the HR Impact show, Dr. Jim chats with Joy Van Patten, unfolding the unexpected success story of Division's Maintenance Group—growth amid the pandemic and maintaining a robust workforce. Van Patten shares insights into developing a company culture that thrives on mission alignment, even in an industry typically characterized by high employee turnover and seasonal demand.

The narrative begins with Joy Van Patten's leap into the facilities management space and DMG's compelling vision that extends beyond the mundane tasks of clearing parking lots or sweeping floors. This episode traverses the story of how DMG's employee-centric approach and a consistent dedication to their core mission enabled them to not only survive but significantly grow during the pandemic. From unprecedented challenges to adopting a hybrid work model, this discussion is a testament to the power of agile leadership and deeply rooted organizational values.

Key Takeaways:

Organizational growth hinges on a compelling mission: A culture anchored in a clear and meaningful mission can thrive in any industry.

Leadership attitude is crucial: The behavior and engagement of leadership directly determine the adherence to company values at all levels.

Transparency and feedback drive improvement: Constantly collecting and acting on feedback from all stakeholders is key to organizational resilience.

Employee alignment to vision goes beyond perks: Connecting every role to the broader company vision motivates employees beyond the immediate job tasks.

Readiness for change guarantees survival: A willingness to pivot, adapt, and say "yes" in times of uncertainty can position a company for unexpected growth.

Chapters:

0:01:05 Joy Van Patten's background and experience

0:07:51 Connecting the work of facilities management to a greater purpose

0:12:29 How investing in value and behavior paid off during the pandemic

0:15:49 Navigating remote work, hybrid models, and future growth

0:19:29 Communicating the opportunities and future growth for line-level employees

0:22:38 CEO involvement and addressing feedback every 90 days

0:24:56 Importance of leadership living the mission

Connect with Dr. Jim: linkedin.com/in/drjimk

Connect with CT: linkedin.com/in/cheetung

Connect with Joy Van Patten: linkedin.com/in/joy-van-patten-b298233

Music Credit: winning elevation - Hot_Dope



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What if I told you that a company that does this type of work. Was able to grow consistently. And in fact, grew at almost 70 percent over the pandemic and was able to keep their people through the experience. What if I told you that their secret to success? Is it really that much of a secret? That's the conversation that we're going to have today with joy van patten vp of organizational development at divisions maintenance group So what's joy's story?

Joy Van Patten: Thank you. It's my pleasure to be here. Dr. Jim.

Dr. Jim: Yeah. Nice to have you on. And I know I didn't mention like the 15 million certifications that you have across all sorts of different instruments. So I'll let you do that. One of the first order of business is for you to get the listeners up to speed on some of the interesting things about your background.

That's going to really inform the conversation.

We have been a traditional insurance company. So really helping the company make that switch at the same time. Also helping with operational excellence. It got a lot of certifications in total quality management. Love Dr. Deming and some of the teachings he stands for. Been able to apply some of that.

Started there as a trainer. Worked my way up to being one of the principal. Consultants helping with, mergers, acquisitions, again, continuing just down that change pathway. Left there after 10 years did consulting for about another 10. I always tell people you starting to add the years up. Yes.

I was like the Doogie Hauser of OD, like a total child prodigy. I began when I was five, everybody five, because I'm nowhere near as old as my years add up. But work with a lot of companies Just helping them with organizational assessment work and training and learning, developing their leaders doing some total quality operational efficiency work.

I thought, you know what? I kind of miss being with a team long term, even though my client base was long term. But I thought I really miss being, in the middle of the action all the time. And I thought I've done the corporate thing, done the consulting thing. Let's try the entrepreneurial kind of quasi startup thing.

Job comes across my job board first one and I went, oh my gosh, that's my job. It was kismet and So crazy that divisions maintenance group would hire someone like me at the timing that They didn't even really have a formal structure at the that point in time and I don't think we're even Knew really what all I was bringing to the table.

I think it was just one of those things. The universe says you need her, she needs you. Let's make it work. And as they say, the rest is, has been history.

Joy Van Patten: That was definitely a question that crossed my mind. I thought, why am I even going to this interview? There's other industries. I spent time with a lot of our children's hospitals in the state of Ohio. I was very compelled to possibly look into that. But as I said, this isn't this popped up something inside of me said, this is where you're supposed to be met with the founder CEO, Gary Mitchell.

He was still our CEO today and just his vision. We just clicked and I saw something bigger than just weeds and trash. And I saw something that said, this is going to be a company. That is going somewhere like the vision Gary and the team had that was, it was four additional partner founders that were with him at the time.

I'm going to learn something here. I'm going to contribute something here. And I was compelled because of their vision.

Dr. Jim: What was specific about their vision that hooked you in?

Joy Van Patten: I just knew that they were trying to do the right things at the right time. They were growth oriented. It wasn't necessarily about weeds and trash and, broken water pipes for them. It was truly, even though we hadn't articulated it, then I could sense it. It was about, we are providing a service to our customers.

Dr. Jim: One of the other things that I'm curious about you're in the OD space and you occupy an interesting intersection where you're in OD. Within a high volume employee space. So typically, facilities management has a lot of churn. So when you bring those two things together and think about the myths that exist when it comes to the learning practice, the organizational development practice or HR within that space, what's the thing that comes to mind that you really wish would just disappear.

Joy Van Patten: I think the myth of that your industry determines whether there's value or sexiness, right? Appeal. I think people can be somewhat turned off by facility maintenance. We've been using that term throughout this podcast. It's unsexy. So I think one of the myths is saying there's some real exciting work happening here.

It's not just, again, you're just dispatching someone to go, fix something that's broken. You're actually changing someone's life for the better.

Dr. Jim: When I opened the show, I mentioned that there's, I think it's come up a couple of times as well. There's nothing sexy about the actual blocking and tackling of facilities management. And the people that do the work I don't I can't wrap my head around how you can wake up one day and just be like, Oh, I'm going to go sweep a floor or, Oh, I'm going to plow a driveway.

So when you look at that, how is that related to really the realization that helped you and your team grow to where they are now, like what's the connection there?

So they serve their customer and they know that customer inside and out. And it does because our people here have to wake up at three in the morning. If there's a call that comes in and they have to be motivated enough to handle that call, and get that vendor, make sure that job is completed.

They follow it through soup to nuts. And we're dealing with some folks straight out of college, . And that can be a hard sell. And again, where we come into play is getting them aligned to our mission. We celebrate a lot of the hard work that we do here. We work hard, we play hard.

So we try to make a fun environment, but at the same time, we remind them. That what you're providing is vital service, not just to that customer, but to that community, you're providing a vital service to that technician. That's what we're all about. At the end of the day is making lives better. So it really is.

And the time we've been together, wow, that's an amazing feeling. And we've got to make sure that, and we do, we share those stories with our people. They've got to know they're about something bigger than just that individual job that's coming across their computer at four or three in the morning.

Dr. Jim: I understand the principle of what you're talking about. We, it's come up on the show several times with other guests where, the more aligned you are on mission, vision, values, and the more you connect those dots, the stronger culture you'll have. The challenge that I see is, when you look at.

Joy Van Patten: I think early on, we realized that relationships with our vendors was part and parcel to everything that we do and so we realized that we look at, we have almost three different customers.

You have that direct customer, the one that's. Contracting with you to actually perform services and, be that, that intermediary to manage their facilities. We have the vendors that we have to work with vendor companies and technicians. We work with companies as well as the individual techs within those companies and you have employees and each of those have different needs.

And we, we realize that we have to make sure we're. We're balancing the needs of the customer with the needs of the technician with the needs of the employee, and that's not always easy to do, but I think we absolutely pay attention to it. We measure it. We do NPS scores, not just with technicians with customers, but we do it with our employees.

We want to invest in our technicians. One of the things we want to get to, we're not quite there yet, but we're building our app. To really be that technician friendly and looking at how can we add value and kind of where things are transitioning to a gig economy, even with our technicians in terms of having them entrenched with us, not just job by job, but they come to us.

Could be for parts. They come to us for their insurance. They, that we are continuing to add value to their life again, which brings in trench entrenchment, which brings loyalty. We want to do that with our employees, offer them career growth. We are very proud of the fact that we hire and promote from within.

Dr. Jim: It sounds like you've built a pretty decent foundation in terms of aligning value to behavior, like how the organization and leaders within the organization show up and how that actually shows up in policy.

The one thing that I'm trying to figure out is when you look at talking about that stuff in theory and how it actually shows up in terms of business impact, and this is related to the growth trajectory that you went through during the pandemic. How did all of that work end up paying off?

And what's the story of how that was connected in real terms?

Joy Van Patten: That totally begins with our founder and our partnership team, Gary Mitchell, our CEO and founder. I began the company when he was like 23, 24 years of age. So just crazy, vision that he's had throughout all of the years. So it really started there with, he really just has this belief that there's really nothing that can stop us.

I remember several years back, even before the pandemic, there was assault emergency. And as a salt shortage during a heavy snow season, we found it. We procured it. People during a blizzard couldn't get generators. We found generators because we're just crazy enough to believe we're going to find it and we don't let anything in our way.

Pandemic starts definitely, all over the country. Things are shuttering down all of our customers. They're closed, . We're primarily big box retail, especially at that time. They weren't open. All of us were shutted in our homes. You can imagine work orders started to dry up, contracts being canceled right and left here.

It doesn't look good. Other folks in our space are laying off, . They're shuddering. Not sure what's going to happen. We have those difficult conversations. But just enough vision, something inside, I made it was a gut feel that said, let's just see what four more weeks can buy us. This was like in March.

What's a service we've never done before? But you know what we said, we can do that. And we said, we'll figure it out because I got to tell you, it was services. Nobody else had ever done before either. And if we didn't say yes, somebody else was going to say yes and figure it out. We just started our practice of saying, yes, we'll figure it out.

Everybody was in this, let's try it and see what works. And we just kept saying yes. And. When we should have closed down, when we should have had our worst year on record, when we should have had to spend two or three more years rebuilding from that catastrophic year from fiscal year 20, again, April 1, 2020, March 31st of 21, we had our best year on record and we grew net employee growth.

84 new people were added. Not only did we not lay off, we employed 84 net new people. We figured out how to work it online. We figured out how people could work from home. We figured out how to onboard and keep the mission alive.

On the other hand, I'm thinking about it from the employee perspective. That's gotta be high stress. What did you do to keep from having people just burn out from that constant pace?

Joy Van Patten: What helped us during the pandemic, they saw a lot of people around them losing their jobs and they weren't think that definitely helped us not going to take away. From that at all. But you know what? We learned how to be good users of teams very quickly.

So we had daily communications as a team. I started to create ways to start doing remote team building. We did that. You know how we can use some door dash to reward our folks who are working from home, send him a meal on occasion. We just kept the fun. Alive. We kept the communication alive.

Yes, it's fast paced, but you're seeing us accomplish the impossible and you're talking about accomplishing the impossible. Pretty fun. And I will say we hire folks. I mentioned that word earlier, but our people, I think to be successful, we hire for this. They have to have that grit, work hard, play hard, not afraid to dive in and figure it out.

And we gave people that leverage to do that and that trust to do it. And it pays off in dividends.

Dr. Jim: So when you fast forward from that arc and. All the things that you did in a remote environment, kept things fun showed ways or actually demonstrated ways to reward and recognize people that were on the team in remote environments. And then the pandemic is quote unquote over

You had a lot of shifting that happened during the great reset. You probably went through a return to office transition. How did you navigate that and still retain your people and also maintain momentum where the broader world of work is going through a lot of churn?

Joy Van Patten: the pandemic taught all of us. We are capable of remote work prior to that. We hadn't had not done that. Every everybody came to the office 5 days a week. You could work your own calls at home, but we figured out we could make that work. So we went to more of a hybrid.

So I think it loosened us up a little bit that hybridization can work for us, which was a real asset. I think to keeping people and retaining, mhm. We also had some other things of hope to look forward to. We've really, that's really when we began our push towards tech. We'd always used technology, but we're like line in the sand.

So there was also some things to look forward to that I think kept our eye on a greater vision. We also have before us, we are on our way to be a billion dollar company. Within the next year and a half. That's, on our on our purview. And so that's exciting for people to, to rally around too.

And they know we're gonna hit it,

Dr. Jim: You're on this growth trajectory. You've proven out that remote work works. So you've adopted a hybrid model. I'd imagine that creates a competitive advantage against your competition that's in the marketplace. But the other component that's interesting is that you're moving, or at least one of the strategic goals is to get to be a billion dollar organization.

Joy Van Patten: Part of that is is my ability to be a good historian and a storyteller. I talked to my folks who are sitting in my onboarding class and I let many of them know that. Back when I started with the company in 2008, many of the roles they hold today, we're not even on our radar. We didn't even know they were going to be possibilities. And yet here we are and here they sit.

I let them know at a billion, 5 billion, 7 billion company, we can't even imagine. The opportunities today that are going to be created tomorrow. So I tell them, and this is really true. We talk about a billion, but we're still talking about 5 billion, 7 billion. I said, we're still on that rollercoaster going up.

Dr. Jim: We've covered a lot of ground in terms of what you and your team have been able to do over the last 15, 16 years as you're grown to a thousand employee organization. What I'm curious about is what are the key steps that they need to take to get started in building this sort of organization that's deeply connected from mission vision values down to the line level?

Sustainable partnerships, inspired team members. Those are the key elements of our mission. We have battle cry as one, like it doesn't matter what you're doing with the company, we're all in it together and we're going to [00:22:00] celebrate and win together. And go on this journey together. And then you have a leadership team, a CEO that believes in it.

We also have values that are very action oriented. They're very relatable and it really gives you guiding principles. Terms, it's things like. Be prepared to have uncomfortable conversations. You own your results. Customers always come first. We're in it for the long haul.

Our reputation matters. We just have a lot of guiding principles that really you can sit back. Okay. How's this fit line for their basics? And they're not just platitudes on a wall. Like they're ingrained to everything we do. Having my CEO involvement is priceless. He comes in makes a point to talk.

We do two hiring classes a month. He makes a point to come and share. And it's like. A priority on his calendar to come in and share. And we've framed his talk is things that will never change. He gets them excited about some visionary things, but he talks about things that will never change because we know our culture is precious and we never, ever want to take for granted.

And we want to know you were heard. Even if it's not such a fun message to deliver we want them to know we heard them and not just heard them, but here's what we're going to do to show you that we listened and we did that every 90 days. It's a rhythm that we keep every 90 days. He's calling out people who are living our basics.

So again, these are, I think that if you don't have that ingrained, You're building on sand. You have to have that foundation of here's what we're here to do. We're so glad you're on board. I would also say this. Know who you're hiring. We hire people who have to have display that grit. Our interviews are all around.

So you build that foundation. Then you can execute and nothing will really be able to stop you. And you always go back to that solid foundation.

Dr. Jim: Great stuff, Joy. If people want to continue the conversation, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you?

Joy Van Patten: Best way is through email. It's you'll probably have that in the notes, but it's jvanpatten at divisionsinc. com.

Dr. Jim: I appreciate you hanging out with us and sharing your story of how you were able to embed a strong mission alignment into really what's what's some unsexy work.

Now, with that being said, there's a handful of things that, that really stand out that I think is worth. Calling out for folks that are listening when you're looking at, how do you take the stuff that you've written down from a mission, vision, values, perspective, and bring it to life and Britain and make it stick.

The other thing that stands out about this conversation is that throughout the conversation, there was a level of transparency that showed up through all the different twists and turns that the organization went through and the leadership went through and that transparency, I would have to say, probably played a big role in the level of buy in that you got from the people at the line level, the other aspect.

And I think that's another important aspect of how you actually connect the dots from what's written down on paper and how that shows up at the line level is that you have to be willing to take the information good or bad and then act on it. So when I take a look at all of that and we're thinking about building a recipe for success, I think that's the thing that listeners.

And people that are eventually going to view this are going to need to take back is it's not enough to write this stuff down. You have to bring it to life through action. So I appreciate you hanging out with us and sharing that story. For those of you who have listened to the conversation, we appreciate you hanging out.

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