The Great Eight: Lloyd Marks Eight Consecutive Years Ranking Among ‘Best Places To Work’
Out of nearly 1,700 nominations, 50 companies emerged as the 2022 Prairie Business Magazine best places to work, and for the eighth consecutive year, Lloyd Companies is honored to be one of them.
The magazine recognizes top workplaces in North Dakota, Minnesota and South Dakota annually based on how they help employees grow, the benefits they offer and how they provide for a healthy work-life balance.
“We are excited to see so many participants in this year’s contest,” said Prairie Business editor Andrew Weeks. “It is good to see the many companies who have been here before, but also to see some new names on the list. This goes to show that there definitely are some great companies in our region.”
For Lloyd, the 2022 ranking is especially meaningful, as our team has grown substantially in the last year with 119 new full-time, part-time and temporary employees.
“And this year, as of September 1, we were sitting at 97 hired between full-time, part-time, seasonal and interns, so it’s been crazy,” chief of staff Becky Word said. “Construction and property management have grown tremendously, and with that comes a need for support positions. We have more than 20 positions open today, and most of them are new positions.”
But hiring team members is one thing. Creating an environment that makes them decide to stay is a true point of pride at Lloyd.
“Our founders Pat and Craig created an amazing foundation and were all about people, and our CEO Chris is so supportive in everything we do. He’s all about the people too, and if we didn’t have that drive and commitment it would be 10 times harder,” Word said.
About four years ago, Lloyd began a concerted effort to put strategic direction around culture.
“With that came a big emphasis on our onboarding process and our overall employee experience,” Word said. “We implemented buddy programs, mentor programs and very purposeful leadership training. We’ve embraced the Entrepreneurial Operating System and that has changed the communication, so with all this growth we’ve seen our turnover go down and retention go up and even during this time when we’re really growing.”
One of Lloyd’s core values is having fun – and we live it.
“We encourage laughter. We love hearing people laugh and chat at work,” Word said. “And in our outer markets, we’ve seen a lot of growth in Rapid City and Des Moines, and we’re doing a lot of intentional things to embrace them in our culture. I’ve visited with them face to face and they feel it too. They tell me it’s different here, and it is.”
And while the Prairie Business ranking is a welcome outside endorsement of Lloyd’s employee experience, our internal measures support it too.
“We ask our team members the same questions regularly, including ‘How likely are you to refer a friend or acquaintance to work at Lloyd?’” Word said.
It produces an employee net promoter score, where “anything over +50 is excellent. When Lloyd started tracking that metric, we were at +51 and set an ambitious goal of reaching +80. We hit it and then beat it, and then surpassed it even more with a +85 this past July.”
“To do that in a year we’ve grown so much is huge,” Word said. “But even though we do really well in a lot of areas, it’s never good enough. We’re always asking what we can do better.”
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