Animal Supply Co.

Animal Supply Company is one of the leading distributors of wholesale pet products in the U.S. They provide trusted brands to retailers, with the vision to help pets lead healthier, happier and safer lives. Their passion for animals is what motivates them to distribute the highest quality products to their partners.

In order to continue to deliver on their commitment to their partners, Animal Supply Company realized they needed to bring in better qualified candidates and understand what was driving high employee turnover. They teamed up with WorkStep to gather real-time sentiment from their hourly workforce to help create action plans around preventing turnover.

Challenge

Across all industries, companies have seen a significant jump in turnover over the past few years. This has been especially true for those within the supply chain, putting a huge strain on companies like Animal Supply Company to meet customer demands. Employee expectations have shifted, and understanding what motivates them to leave or stay in a position is challenging.

Animal Supply Company decided to focus on improving overall retention, but most importantly, retention during the first ninety days of employment. They were seeking help with developing a strategy that would address retention of new hires along with tenured teammates across the organization.

They needed a solution that would help them understand and retain their hourly workers, in turn reducing turnover costs, and increasing accountability across the organization.

Solution

Animal Supply Company partnered with WorkStep to help meet their hiring, retention and communication goals.

• Allowed the company to quickly set up automated interviews with previously vetted candidates to ensure a great-fit match
• Enabled Animal Supply Company to engage with their hourly workforce across facilities to gather real-time feedback they could easily take action on to prevent turnover events

The platform was able to reach both English and Spanish speaking teammates, helping Animal Supply Company connect and engage in any language.

This helped them hire stronger, well-suited frontline workers and improve retention rates within the first 90 days of being hired, as well as improving attrition within their tenured workforce.

Results

By leveraging WorkStep, Animal Supply Company was able to facilitate conversations with their hourly workers and management teams in their distribution centers nationwide. This allowed leadership to create action plans around their true turnover drivers.

The platform not only enabled them to gauge the sentiments of their workforce, but view these insights across facilities, roles, and new hire/tenure milestones. They could also see the breakdown of feedback by theme and assess what was trending in order to create meaningful initiatives with positive outcomes.

Using the insights gathered, Animal Supply Company partnered with the management team from each distribution center to take action on opportunities to enhance overall employee satisfaction.

The feedback collected also uncovered distribution centers who positively stood out across the organization. These practices were then replicated at other facilities.

In addition to understanding the reasons behind turnover, Animal Supply Company was also able to capture the positive sentiments from their workers, such as teamwork. This led them to create new opportunities for workers to have more time to collaborate as a team.

As a result of leaning into the WorkStep capabilities, Animal Supply Company implemented new initiatives that led to a significant decrease in turnover. Over 6 months, they reduced turnover 50% and reached projected annualized turnover rates as low as 55%.