Building a workplace culture that actually cares

Everyone says, “People matter.” It’s printed on the posters, stitched into the mission statements, and plastered on every careers page. But if you look closely at the growing divide between corporate executives and front-line employees, you’ll see what most workers already know: Saying people matter and proving people matter are two very different things.

At P&M Apparel, we’ve learned that a strong culture doesn’t come from slogans or luck; it comes from consistent, intentional choices. Over the years, we’ve built a team that shows up early, volunteers at events, and genuinely takes ownership of the work we do. I run our business with my brother Ryan, and we took it over from our mother, who took it over from our grandparents. We’ve learned some things from them, and we’ve learned some things from our own experiences as employers and employees. It’s not magic. It’s culture. And it’s something you can build too.

Based on statistics from Glassdoor, 77% of adults consider a workplace’s culture before applying for a job. 63% of workers report being happy at their job if they feel respected by their leaders, and 80% of employees who felt disrespected by their leader at work spent significant time at work reflecting on it instead of being productive.

Another 48% of those disrespected employees polled deliberately reduced their work output, and in most cases, their resentment spilled over to other employees or even clients, while conversely, happy salespeople lead to an increase in sales by 37%. There is no question that workers can tell when you genuinely care about their mental health, safety, and happiness or when you prioritize profits over people.

We didn’t always start out with the culture we have now, but one thing has been passed down from the two generations before us: When the company is successful, the employees are successful. For our grandparents and parents, this meant not only paying their staff the best they could and giving raises when they could, but it also meant making sure the employees got paid before they did.

On several occasions, I saw my mom forego her paycheck, even though she was clearly the hardest-working, most seasoned, and valuable employee in the company. To make sure payroll was covered for everyone else, she would work extra hours way before dawn to ensure jobs got done without her staff burning out or her budget going belly up. I think this is a key point of our culture that’s been handed down and really prompted two questions I asked myself when I started managing, and I ask other shops when they ask me how to do it. First, how well do you pay your employees? And second, what kind of leader are you?

How well do you pay your employees?

I don’t want to assume pay is everything, because according to the Glassdoor study, 36% of workers would take a $5,000 annual pay cut if it meant they could guarantee they were happy at work. But that doesn’t mean pay means nothing. With the housing crisis, the increased costs of living, groceries, and bills, things like minimum wage aren’t acceptable for any potential employee of quality. You want people to show up and care, you’ve got to make paying them well a priority. One of the ways we do this is right in the sale: We never try to race to the bottom on our costs. 

If a client says they can get the price cheaper from a competitor, we explain that our priority in pricing is to pay our employees well, and so we aim to be competitive, but never try to be the cheapest. We try to be the best. Because all of our team members know this is a priority for us, they reach for the end of that bargain and strive to be the best to show they are absolutely worth fighting and paying for. We’ve found the clients we want to work with are the clients that appreciate high quality and high service, so our stance becomes cyclical: We serve them well, they pay what that service is worth. 

My mom also took a lot of pride in beating employees to the pay raise, and we aim to do that in our leadership as well. She had a long history of no one ever asking her for a raise because she had already given it before they got a chance, and gave bonuses out whenever she could. That’s a tradition I can get behind and want to keep as a strong value. 

Another way we make paying well a priority is by automating as best as we can afford and keeping the staff as lean as we can. We don’t hire until it’s clear it’s an absolute priority and really spend a lot of time analyzing each employee’s “plate” to see if we need to shuffle work to a different person, or find a way to make the work they’re doing more automated and efficient so their workload can increase while not taking more room on their plate.

Our management team really thrives with automation and efficiency; in the front of the house, we’re using CRMs, AI, Printavo, Jotform, Zapier, and more to help the team take on more clients, with better service, for less time. In production, it’s capitalizing on equipment to get faster and higher quality production results, and also analyzing ways to get lean on time and movements to get the job done. 

One thing we do with pay that appears different than most of our peer shops is we don’t pay our sales team commission, and we don’t set hard sales goals. Our salespeople are called account managers because that’s what they spend most of their time doing: nurturing the accounts and existing relationships we have with clients instead of spending time constantly pursuing outside sales. Most of our business comes from returning clients, and in any business, returning clients are your warmest leads. So, we focus our attention on them and people who come in by word of mouth.

Because we typically don’t hire people with a background in hard sales, they’re drawn to the job of working with people, while not having the pressure of hitting goals to make sure they have food on their table. They don’t feel the need to prioritize big cash outs over little clients that deserve the same service. It really helps with camaraderie and team culture, too; our production team doesn’t feel like they’re doing all the work for someone else to get the payout, and our other account managers don’t feel like they’re competing against each other for the better payouts and can instead help balance the job load wherever needed. 

What kind of leader are you?

My brother Ryan is my business partner, and we literally grew up in this industry. We were reclaiming just about as soon as we could reach the equipment. We helped hoop or clean threads and backing with our grandparents as soon as we could be trusted with scissors, and were heat pressing as soon as we could be trusted to lay the design down straight. We don’t know everything about this business, but we do know we could step in and bridge the gap in any position here if someone were gone. If we’ve got deadlines to hit and a full schedule, I’m the first one to head to production and jump in as long as needed.

I want my team to know if they’re struggling to get through their workload, that I won’t be sitting back letting them struggle, I will be in the trenches helping them, and prioritizing their work, mental health, and whatever else over my comfy office.

This is something that’s missing in the workforce, and employees know it — your staff doesn’t want to work for someone who’s not working as hard as or harder than they are. Why would I break my back for a boss that’s always on vacation, and when they’re not, they’re playing games on their computer or something? It’s a lot easier to get your staff to care when they can see you caring right next to them.

The ship

A few years ago, Ryan, my mom, and I went through the book “Traction” by Gino Wickman. It revolutionized our business in a myriad of ways, like developing our core values that we filter a lot of our decision-making through, job ladder structures, and standardized pricing. When it came to employee hiring and retention, it gave us the ship.

We sometimes refer to it as the bus, or the canoe, or some other mode of transportation, but the sentiment remains the same: You have this vessel, of which you are the captain, and you have a crew. The crew has to be of the same mind on the direction the ship is going, the things we have to do to get the ship moving, and be willing to work together for the success of getting the ship moving in the same direction.

We, as owners, are the captains and are the first to name the direction we’re going and how we want to get there. In our shop, we’ve got a management level who are first mates, and they’re doing everything they can to get their deck hands, rowers, cooks, or whoever to be doing what needs to be done to make that plan happen. 

The hard part about the discovery of the ship is realizing some of our staff at the time were decidedly not on board. They didn’t have the best interests of the team in mind, didn’t care who they were making mad, and maybe didn’t care about the quality of work they were putting out. Some of these people had been around for years, creating toxicity in their wake or being an anchor that was slowing us down. We had to get them off the ship.

It wasn’t just hard realizing we needed to boot those people from the ship to make it work better; it was hard realizing we had done some bad hiring to begin with. You can’t hire someone just because they’re funny or friendly. You can’t hire someone just because they have an impressive résumé, but are terrible to be around, either. We had to completely change how we view the right potential employee for the job and what worked for our ship. 

The biggest change we made is that, as a general rule, we don’t hire from within our industry. Nearly every person we’ve ever hired who had a ton of experience in the industry ended up not fitting well on our ship. We’ve found that all the previous experience really clashed with how we wanted them to do things and had a lot of ego problems associated with the previous experiences. The difficulty that comes with that is that every time we hire someone, we are training them from the very beginning. Also, what do you look for in an employee if not someone with relevant experience?

We have different rules of thumb based on whether you’re in sales or production. If you’re in sales, we’re looking for someone who has experience in high-pressure situations, managing high-maintenance clients. We’ve hired a lot of teachers in this role, but also nurses and assisted living caregivers, vet techs, people from the bridal industry, event planners, etc. If hiring for screen printing, we look for a lot of bartenders, service industry folks, people we know can respond quickly, pivot when things don’t go right and can handle high-paced work and being on their feet. In embroidery, we tend to look for crafters with an eye for meticulous work. 

My graphic designer once made a bet with me. He said he would buy me lunch if one of my interview questions for a potential sales position, asked with all seriousness, was “What should I have for dinner?” Not only did I take that bet and crush it, but we also hired that employee who has now been with us over two years and manages several six-digit accounts wonderfully. It became a go-to question for me in the interview process. I could ask, “How good are you at problem solving?” but who is going to say they’re bad at problem-solving? This question hit directly on a core thing we look for in account managers.

Here’s why: How many times do we have a client walk in and say, “Hi, I would like shirts. How much for shirts?” One of our core values is problem-solving because not every client who walks in the door is going to know what we need to get them what they need. This question told me exactly how the interview candidate thinks through solving a problem and pulling out information from their client, who knows nothing about apparel.

If the candidate quickly answered something like “Spaghetti,” that told me one thing. If the candidate answered by asking about food allergies, people I was dining with, plans for the rest of the night, preferences, budget, etc., that would be a completely different client experience. And that’s the type of person I want on my ship.

Another factor that plays a big role on our ship is education. By starting with clean slates, we know we have to be locked in with training on our end. We use QR codes for instructions on most of our machines and tell them to scan it and then come with questions. Around heat presses, we have QR codes for different times/pressures/heat depending on the garment and application. We also use QR codes for any supplies needing restocking that link directly to a Monday board for ordering. 

We have developed extremely detailed SOPs for each step of the process, from an order coming in the door to out the door. We have a previous employee who went into the field of training modules and built us our own training module to get an account manager onboarded on the initial process of sales.

But beyond that, we try to find educational opportunities for ourselves and our staff. We try to attend a lot of trade shows and conferences, and we will corner just about anyone in the industry to talk shop. We also cross-train in different departments, so teams know how other teams function, and there’s as much coverage as possible to cover workload shifting or staffing gaps.

Every Friday morning, we bring in breakfast and have staff speak on their job or something about the industry that would help us grow as a team. This not only provides education across different departments, but also empathy and unification of the whole team. It provides opportunities to share ideas, test how processes could be improved, and be fed not only literally, but mentally and emotionally. We don’t do it to look for praise for how nice we are; we do it because our business is better for it.

Culture isn’t a slogan or some buzzy catchword to try to get your staff to fall in line. It’s not free pizza or a catchy value statement. It’s a living system built by leaders who pay well, work hard, and build trust through action. When your people know they matter — really matter — they’ll push your business farther than you ever could alone.