WORKPLACE CULTURE
refugees, including people from the Congo, Nepal, and Somalia, plus more from Burma. Rather than the magic bullet he’d hoped for, though, this batch of new employees was, as Ruder puts it, “a complete disaster.” Instead of being reliable and eager like the first group, the 18 new hires would often just not show up to work, without even calling. Almost every week, a new employee would shoot himself in the hand or ankle with the high-powered nail guns workers used on the job. In the past, Ruder might have simply fired all the poor performers and chalked the experiment up as a failure. But over the previous year or two, something inside Ruder had started to shift. The transformation was gradual and complicated — as most big things in life are. On a day-to-day level, the trust he felt in
An employee stamping pallets. Ruder now fields inquiries from other businesses about how L&R has such a strong workplace safety record.
the new plant manager he’d finally decided to hire, a man named Jay Doyle whom he’d spent years getting to know and months courting to join his team, must have helped. With the company’s day-to-day operations in reliable hands and the sting of the embezzlement fading with time, Ruder found himself feeling hungry for something more to his work than just running a decent business and cracking the nut of making more and more money. He was looking for purpose, for meaning. The embezzlement right on the heels of the recession likely had something to do with it; as Ruder puts it, “If somebody doesn’t hit bottom, do they look up?” The maturity of midlife, of being in his 40s and starting to think about the legacy he might leave, also played a role. Ask him about what changed, specifically,
and he’ll tell you about a mission trip to Peru, an electric touch on the arm from an orphan girl that brought him to his knees, and a message from God like a kiss on the forehead, saying, “I need you to care about people.” As he began to soften and open, what he heard God telling him, again and again, was a strong message about love for those around him — including his employees. So instead of giving up on the new refugee hires, or focusing on the negative, Ruder made a choice that would turn out to be pivotal for the business: he decided to listen. His first move was to talk with each of his 25 refugee employees individually. He quickly learned how many of his basic assumptions about these men were wrong. For example, he’d figured that if 10 of them were from Burma, they’d all speak the same language