Boosting Employee Morale at a Manufacturing Plant in Kansas

What started as a single activity at a chemical plant in Kansas led to a company-wide adoption of Metalog Tools by global mineral supplier ICL

When Jason Miller was a year into his role as the manager of a phosphate manufacturing plant in Lawrence, Kansas, he realized he had inherited a serious communication problem. The plant is owned by ICL, a global supplier of specialty minerals and chemicals, and its annual Employer of Choice survey revealed that morale there was very low.

Miller thought a fun team builder could lead employees in a new direction and approached Iva Platt, who manages learning and development for ICL from St. Louis, for help. It was the summer of 2021, when many corporate sites were still shut down from Covid, and he told her, “Our group is vaccinated. I hear you’re vaccinated. I’m going to get a banquet hall where we can social distance and spread out. We’d like for you to come and lead a team builder with us. But instead of the stuff you usually do, we want something fun.”

“I paused for a beat,” Platt recalls. “I don’t really do fun at all. If you’re my age and you’ve worked in learning and development, you’ve seen a lot of bad team building.”

But Miller was insistent, so Platt searched for an upbeat activity that would help him with team development and communication. She found Metalog Tools online, purchased CommuniCards and planned an event.

Employee skepticism gave way to fun and learning

“At first, they [the plant workers] weren’t really sure what to think because we hadn’t done anything like that before. But the cool thing is they kind of lost themselves in the game. So even though they came in with some trepidation, giving me the hairy eyeball, thinking ‘This is corporate-mandated fun. This can’t be good,’ they had fun.”

CommuniCards was a smart choice for Miller’s group. It’s comedic at first because everyone is blindfolded and asked to describe items they can’t see, but it quickly becomes an important lesson in explicit communication.

In the activity, the facilitator hands out 28 plastic shape cards from a set of 30, then asks the group to determine which two cards are missing. Because no one can see, they must quickly find a common language to describe their shapes. If someone leaves out even a single detail, they won’t succeed. The experience is a lighthearted way to help people think about and modify how they communicate with each other.
 
“The guys with the hard hats and steel toed shoes, they don’t come in and talk about how they communicate. That’s not natural to them,” Platt says. “But the game seemed to open them up a little bit and let them talk to each other in a very non-confrontational way where nobody was going to get angry, nobody was pointing, nobody was accusing anybody.”

“We had a very diverse group of plant employees,” Miller recalls. “And after we did the activity and went into the debrief, we really got to talk about the real issues and what mattered most to people.”

CommuniCards led to quantifiable results on employee surveys

Miller and Platt were so impressed with how easily CommuniCards led to important conversations that they planned more events, and Platt now travels to Lawrence four times a year to lead other Metalog activities.

The impact is undeniable, Miller says. “Morale is higher. Engagement is higher. Productivity is greater throughout the plant.”

“The ROI is fantastic,” Platt adds. “We see teams functioning better. We see better results on that Employer of Choice survey.”

“The company as a whole is very positively impacted and that definitely makes a huge difference.”

Why reject the evidence? Games help Platt make a greater impact at ICL

The experience also led Platt to rethink her stance on fun team builders and games. Because the Metalog activities were so effective in Lawrence, she began to use them throughout ICL North America, and occasionally at ICL sites in other countries.

“I’ve used these games with every level of employee. I’ve used these with executive groups. I’ve used them with chemical operators. I’ve used them with middle management. I’ve used them with the customer service team. They work at every level of the organization.”

“When you ask people to discuss a topic, when you just walk in with slides and discussion questions, you get glazed-over looks. You can see the wheels turning in people’s heads and they are going to start spitting phrases out that they think you want to hear. It’s not meaningful to them.”

“But when they play the game and they connect the dots themselves, then there is meaning to it. That’s truthfully the difference.”