Wholestone Farms: Driving a Culture of Continuous Development

The food manufacturing industry is no stranger to rapid shifts in workforce demands, skills gaps, and a heightened need for operational efficiency. Wholestone Farms, a company dedicated to producing high-quality pork, has navigated these challenges head-on by embedding a culture of compliance, competency, and continuous development into its HR strategy.  

Grant Prenzlow, HR Director at Wholestone Farms recently joined us for a webinar where he shared how they accomplished building a culture of learning and development and reduced turnover by 25%. 

Starting fresh 

When Wholestone Farms split from their parent company they needed to do a full re-start of their learning and development programs.  Grant and his team saw this as an opportunity to build a learning and development program based on a culture with an emphasis on competency, not compliance.   

They started with identifying the challenges they needed to solve for first:  

1. A Retiring Workforce: As long-term employees approached retirement, the company needed a succession plan to retain and transfer institutional knowledge.
   
   
2. Inexperienced Talent Pool: Wholestone Farms was struggling to find employees with the skills they required, and recognized they needed to hire for ability and train the skills.
   
   
3. Resource Constraints: Operating within tight margins and high demand, the organization needed to act quickly to maintain a high-performance workforce. 

The Holistic Approach: Building a Foundation for Success 

Given these pressures, Wholestone Farms committed to a "hire to retire" training model, focusing on upskilling, succession planning, and career growth.  The focus areas included: 

• A culture of continuous training, not just onboarding 

• A training culture based on upskilling employees so that they were always advancing new hires, and backfilling the most front-line jobs 

• Training built to drive peak performance 

Gaining Executive Buy-In 

Securing support from leadership was critical. The team at Wholestone used data and ROI projections to communicate how this approach would alleviate challenges such as high turnover, increased production requirements and audit challenges. They framed the initiative as a solution to “what keeps your leadership up at night,” making the case for investing in long-term workforce improvements. 

Results 

Wholestone Farms has seen substantial gains from its development initiatives: 

• 3X Increase in Training Utilization: More employees are engaging in training, reinforcing a culture of growth. 

• Audit Readiness: By streamlining training and documentation, Wholestone Farms is better prepared for both internal and external audits at a moment’s notice. 

• Enhanced Skills Matrix: A comprehensive and actionable skills matrix now guide development and hiring, ensuring that skills gaps are identified and addressed. 

• Reduced Turnover: Turnover was reduced by 25%, greatly reducing the hiring burden put on the HR team.   

Wholestone Farms’ journey illustrates the transformative power of a committed approach to employee development. By fostering a culture of continuous learning and aligning HR initiatives with business goals, they have created a resilient, high-performance workforce poised to meet future challenges. 

Listen to the full session to learn more about how Grant and his team, in partnership with WorkForge, accomplished these great results.   

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