The Wonderful Company’s Stephen Howe on Creating a Great Place to Live and Work

Roula Amire
2025-01-07T04:00:32-05:00
The Wonderful Company’s Stephen Howe on Creating a Great Place to Live and Work
Great Place To Work

We dive into how The Wonderful Company, one of the Fortune 100 Best Workplaces to Work For?, has transformed the rural community of Lost Hills, California, into a thriving place to work and live on this episode of the Better podcast.

Stephen Howe, EVP of human resources and chief financial officer, discusses how the company is making a positive impact on employees' lives and their communities through innovative programs and a commitment to sustainability. This includes providing free healthcare, healthy meals, and making significant investments in community infrastructure.

On supporting employee wellness:

Through all of our extensive wellness efforts since 2015, we have decreased pre-diabetes amongst our employee population by more than 50%. We've got more work to do, but it’s had a major transformative impact:

Our chief medical officer, Dr. Larry Wolk, oversees five wellness clinics in each of the areas in the Central Valley where we have major operations, and a mobile health clinic to cover areas where we don't have a high concentration of people.

We staff bilingual doctors and nurses who provide primary healthcare, mental health support, and other wellness services to our employees and their families, and we don’t charge them for those services.

We have healthy onsite cafeterias in each of our major locations and provide healthy subsidized meals for our staff when they're at work. We also offer healthy meal kits that they can take home. We have fruit and vegetable stands for our employees as well because some parts of the Central Valley are food deserts, and that allows them to buy fresh fruits and vegetables that are subsidized so they can take them home and share with their family,

Each of our major locations has onsite gyms so people can work out before work, during a break, or after work.

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On the turnaround story of Lost Hills, California:

This effort was really the brainchild of our co-owner, Lynda Resnick, and she wanted to find a way to meaningfully give back, given all the success that she has had, and she decided to start with Lost Hills because over 50% of households have a Wonderful employee, and she recognized that this was a town that really was lost.

Nobody cared about Lost Hills. It was a working class, largely Spanish-speaking, dusty, small, rural town. It was rundown, but it was filled with amazing people who just needed to be given a chance and an opportunity, and Lynda wanted to help. She started by listening. She didn't go in and say, "Hey, I've got all the answers."

And that's where our research team came in, led by one of our key executives, Amy Snow. They got involved and together with Lynda, they interviewed the residents to understand what they needed, what they wanted, and what the problems were. And over the past decade, through many people's hard work, and Lynda's leadership, we have transformed that town. If you went and saw it today versus 10 years ago, it looks very different. We've invested over $90 million into Lost Hills.

On making work meaningful for hourly workers:

We have a program called WOW, our Wonderful Way of Work, and the idea is to give all employees, especially frontline employees, training and tools to solve the problems that they see and encounter at work. Senior executives like me, we only see some of the problems a company faces. They tend to be big ones. They may be cross-cutting ones across multiple groups, but we don't really see any problems within a team where candidly, most of the value is being added.

What this does is it allows everyone to solve the problems that they find at work, and it allows us a standard way to do that and to communicate that across the company.

So we have a WOW Global Competition where all the WOW teams throughout the globe get together, and we pick the best couple of projects. Last time, we gave them a trip to Hawaii. A team from the Central Valley won, and a team from Mexico won, and they then went to Hawaii and had a great time.

A second area that gives a sense of meaning for employees is our Wonderful Giving program. As part of our place-based giving approach, Lynda and Stuart Resnick grant every full-time Wonderful employee up to $1,000 to give to a nonprofit of their choice, and they'll match an additional $1,000 if someone wants to give their own money.

On the importance of listening:

One of the things I think I've been working on in my career is focusing on listening. I'll listen to WOW presentations once a month and I'll spend an hour or so with my teams listening to their finished WOW presentations.

But if it's even better if you can just have the other person do it, and you can watch and cheer them on. If you do that successfully, you'll find that people over time will take more initiative and they'll do more on their own, and that's the way you want it as a leader.