At KAW Services we recently took a good long look at what drives us. We’re a family-owned company. We’re a small business. We’ve been in operation for nearly 90 years. We are truly special in the bulk transport industry.
And underlying all these factors, we realized, are the core values that define us as a tractor trailer repair and tank cleaning business.
This realization spurred a period of reflection for KAW Services, which was so rewarding and enlightening we just had to share it.
To start, we asked our employees: what motivates you at work day to day? To which standards do you hold yourself and your fellow employees? What makes KAW a rewarding place to work?
After we’d gotten a good idea of the values we were already practicing out in the bays and in the office, we asked everyone to rank the values in order of importance with a short explanation. Their answers proved that, although we hadn’t yet formalized our core values, they were already at the forefront of our work days.
They were, without further ado:
- Safety above all else
- Communicate with candor
- Be customer-obsessed
- Take pride in work as a team
- Act with integrity
Since writing our core values, we’ve worked harder than ever to recognize those putting them into practice.
Every month we give employees the opportunity to cite fellow workers who have recently embodied a core value. Their answers have been so fun to read. They include descriptions of employees:
- Going above and beyond to keep their work space clean (taking pride)
- Speaking up when an important tool broke (safety)
- Noticing when a customer needed help (customer-obsessed)
We may work on trucks, but people are the true heart of our business – both our employees and our customers. To keep up the spirit of recognition, over the next few weeks we’ll be highlighting each of our core values in blog posts. We can’t wait to share them with you.