Keeping Manufacturing Turnover Near 3.5%: A Playbook for HR Leaders

When an operating partner ties next year's bonus pool to EBITDA and asks HR to prove that retention and pay move it, most teams reach for a dashboard they built by hand. Kevin Trowbridge, Director of Compensation at Kimray, a 75-year-old manufacturer serving the oil and gas industry, runs it the other way. He leads with culture, pays for skill, and reads the financial result off real-time data, with no analytics team on staff.

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Why does Kimray interview for culture before skill?

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Because character is harder to teach than competence. Kimray's hiring process opens with a culture fit rather than a skills screen, on the belief that the right person can learn the job. "One thing that we talk about at Kimray is character and competence can lead to consistency, and that character piece is so important," Trowbridge says. "Often you can teach the competency to people that you hire if they have good character." The company backs that up with programs most manufacturers do not run, including a recovery friendly workplace that keeps jobs open for team members going through treatment.

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How does paying for skill cut frontline turnover?

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It gives frontline workers a direct reason to stay and grow. Trowbridge was hired to build job families and pay levels that tie certifications to raises, so learning the craft changes the paycheck. On an $18 to $20 hourly wage, one certification is worth about a dollar an hour. "That's impactful on somebody making $18 to $20 an hour. A dollar an hour is huge," he says. Seven or eight people have leveled up since March. The same structure made the workforce flexible: warehouse staff can move into assembly and back as demand shifts, which Trowbridge says has made managers' lives dramatically easier.

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What keeps voluntary turnover near 3.5%?

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Culture and pay together, reinforced by long tenure. Voluntary turnover sits around 3.5% year to date, and when people do leave, it is usually after five or six years. "people come here and they don't leave willingly," Trowbridge says. Some who started at 18 are still there in their late twenties, a decade of knowledge kept in house. Low turnover also lowers cost. A single posting draws about a hundred applications, so Kimray fills roles without paying headhunters.

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How do you tie HR programs to EBITDA without an analytics team?

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By connecting people data to the number leaders already watch. EBITDA drives Kimray's bonus plans, so the team links engagement and turnover straight to it. When the latest engagement survey came back, they matched it against turnover. "you can see there's higher turnover where there's less engaged team members, and we're able to tie that together," Trowbridge says. Real-time dashboards replaced the Tableau reports the team once built by hand. A turnover breakdown by business unit that once took an hour or two in Excel now takes 20 minutes, and the saved time goes to deeper questions like PTO policy and retirement.

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What changes when managers get direct access to people data?

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They stop waiting on reports and answer their own questions. Access began with an HR team that did not consider itself especially data driven, and it is spreading to the C-suite and, next, to VPs who want a view of their own unit. A head of supply chain will soon see a dashboard limited to her organization. Trowbridge's larger point is about what the data is for. "part of analytics is not just the numbers. It's telling the story behind the numbers, and having the ability to do that at the drop of a dime is such a huge thing," he says.

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For HR leaders under pressure to prove their worth, the Kimray case makes one thing plain: culture and financial proof come from the same work. The programs that keep people also generate the numbers a CEO will act on.

Kevin Trowbridge (00:02): Culture is so important to Kimray and being a good cultural fit that, yeah, our interview process starts with a culture fit. Our voluntary turnover sits somewhere around like three and a half percent year to... There is not something that we do that we don't consider, how is this going to impact our team members?

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Logan (00:20): In this episode of Pulse, we're talking with Kevin Trowbridge, Director of Compensation at Kimray, a 75-year-old manufacturing company that's doing something rare in HR. They're leading with culture and using real-time workforce data to drive retention, engagement, and bottom line impact. Kevin shares how Kimray built a culture-first hiring process, structured pay and job families to motivate frontline employees, and used HR data to help executives make faster, better decisions, all without hiring a full analytics team. Kimray has done an excellent job building a flexible workforce and tying HR programs to EBITDA. Kevin brings practical, real-world insights so you can do the same. Let's get into it.

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Logan (01:02): I'm here with Kevin Trowbridge, Director of Compensation at Kimray. He's been with Kimray about a year, and one of his big projects was to come in and add job levels for pay, correct?

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Kevin Trowbridge (01:13): Yes, that was one of the first things I was tasked with.

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Logan (01:15): Great. So before we kick it off into a couple of the points that he and I want to discuss, Kevin, is there anything else that you would like the audience to know about you and Kimray before we get into it?

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Kevin Trowbridge (01:28): Yeah, Kimray is a company, we've been around just over 75 years, founded in Oklahoma City, built in Oklahoma City, and just grew and grew and grew. We serve the oil and gas industry. We provide pressure release valves for our well sites around the country and we are heavily influenced by that. But overall, we are a manufacturing company, and our CEO will remind you of that. We are a manufacturing company. We are not an oil and gas company. And the biggest thing is, Kimray is so centered on our values, on our mission, and that is what we live by. That's what we go every day and we focus on, and we do our work according to that.

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Logan (02:08): Awesome. And I love the Kimray story. I have a soft spot for, because I spent five years working with frontline organizations, helping them communicate with their employees. So I have a soft spot for frontline based organizations and things they do. But our first question and topic I want to dive into is almost like a playbook out of the Built to Last book. I don't know if you've read that, by Jim Collins. One of the points in there of companies that are longstanding history companies is they hire people first and they have a certain culture in the company. And he uses all sorts of things in there like, HP was one of them, where they were concerned about building a company. The product was secondary, and like, they had an idea of what type of organization they were going to build. And I think that that is such a good place to start for Kimray, because you guys are culture first and that's how you run. And I want to talk, like, what is it like to lead with culture as an organization, or be at an organization that does that?

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Kevin Trowbridge (03:17): Yeah, so to both parts, I mentioned our mission and our vision. Our mission is to better the lives of the people we serve. So that is what we do, whether it is in our community, at home, in the workplace, that is what our culture is driven off of. And that mission, I mean, it permeates every thought process. There is not something that we do that we don't consider, how is this going to impact our team members? How is this going to impact our community? How is this going to impact our home life, whatever it may be? So there are so many programs that are put in place here that, one, you don't see at other companies, or you don't see as fully embraced at other companies, that help create that culture here at Kimray.

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Logan (04:00): What's one of those programs that is fully embraced?

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Kevin Trowbridge (04:04): Yeah, so one thing that we just got recognized for over the last couple of weeks is a recovery friendly workplace. And so we actually work with rehab centers and places like that. So if we have team members that need to go into recovery, they're not going to be losing their jobs. We're going to be friendly to those coming out of recovery. And so we actually, was a program reckon our leaders were recognized in DC and everything for it. That's a big program that we do that allows us to really impact, you know, part of the community that usually is looked down upon or overlooked, just because they've gone through hard times. And our leaders are like, you know what, we're going to be a place that we can make their lives better by being a company that is friendly to those going.

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Logan (04:55): I love that. I mean, I'm sure people have all known people that have had that happen. And it's awesome hearing organizations step up and do that kind of stuff. I really, really like that. That's a really cool program. But on the culture stuff, one of the things that you had mentioned, and maybe other people have done this, I don't know. I don't think anybody else has done it this way, but you guys lead with a culture-first interview. So you put your culture interview first. And when you told me that, was like, that's number, like, A, that's really awesome. And B, you've completely flipped the interview process on its head.

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Kevin Trowbridge (05:31): Yeah. So culture is so important to Kimray and being a good cultural fit that, yeah, our interview process starts with a culture fit. One thing that we talk about at Kimray is character and competence can lead to consistency, and that character piece is so important. Often you can teach the competency to people that you hire if they have good character. And so that's why we start with that. We want to make sure that, one, you're going to be a good fit for Kimray. You understand our mission. You understand our values, and that you're really going to embrace that. And then, you know what, if we need to teach you things, then we're more than happy to do that. And we have such a great learning and development team. They go above and beyond what a normal team I've seen does for team members, to help them really develop their skills, and leaders embrace it too. And so we focus on the character. We focus on culture because ultimately that is going to make us successful.

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Logan (06:32): Yeah, and I would imagine between that and the programs that you run and being embraced by leadership, all of that cultural play hits with your turnover rate, which, I mean, it's probably a topic in itself, but it is low, right? Like, what is it?

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Kevin Trowbridge (06:50): Incredibly low. So for our voluntary turnover sits somewhere around like three and a half percent year to date. So we're, I mean, people come here and they don't leave willingly. Now, obviously you have a certain group, you have that involuntary side, but in general, people just don't leave Kimray. They don't want to. They come here. We make sure we take care of them from a pay perspective, from a family perspective, from a benefits perspective, and then just the atmosphere here, it's so different than any other place that I've ever worked at. And it really does. You hear the cheesy line, you know, I love my work family, and my life at work is like a family. It's literally treated that way here. I mean, there are more questions about how are your family than how are you doing with your work? And that is so different than anywhere else I've ever been.

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Logan (07:45): Yeah, and I mean, there's definitely a bottom line number to that. And we'll talk about that when we get to kind of our data section. But you mentioned you take care of people from a pay and benefits perspective. So I wanted to really dive into that a little bit, because when you came in to Kimray, you set up job families and a whole new compensation structure. And that was both from having that structure, but also building a flexible workforce. So I kind of want to touch on both of those. What happened when you came in and implemented that compensation structure?

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Kevin Trowbridge (08:25): Yeah, so when I came in, there were a few groups within our organization who had not had the chance to build out levels. Now, from a training perspective, they had, but there had never been that, what does it look like to have, okay, is there an impact to my pay for learning more? And up to this point, they hadn't done that. Now, we had been around for over 75 years and that hadn't happened. Our products have become more complex. There was more things that we had to understand, our assemblers had to work on. But there was never anything put in place to directly tie learning more about their craft to their pay. And so there wasn't that incentive. So I was brought in to help kind of push that across the finish line. There had been work done, but it had never been put in place. And so I was able to kind of take what had been done, really get it to fit, you know, one, best practice, and two, kind of how Kimray does things. And there was not a question of what's the cost. Obviously, here's the cost, here's what it's going to impact, but it wasn't a, my goodness. It was like, okay, let's do it.

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And the impact to team members when they realized, I'm literally one certification away from getting a dollar an hour raise. That's impactful on somebody making $18 to $20 an hour. A dollar an hour is huge. And also we've had, think now we're at somewhere around seven or eight people since March who have completed their certifications and been able to level up and are making more, but they're also providing more to the company. They have more flexibility. They have more ability to do the things that we need them to do. And that's been big on, like you said, the flexible workforce. Part of this change was also, if our warehouse people want to go learn assembly, they have the ability to go over there and do that. And if our assemblers are needed in the warehouse area to help pack product, our assemblers can go over there and work on that. And so it's not something where they're completely segregated. If we need you here, go work here. And that flexibility, I mean, it's made managers' lives just dramatically easier too.

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Logan (10:38): Yeah. And I mean, who doesn't like people doing a good job and getting leveled up and promoted? Like, everybody loves to see that.

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Logan (10:47): And there's also probably an ancillary benefit. Like, we talked a little bit at the start about Built to Last. And I remember this vividly, was like, really early in my career. I was at a Christmas dinner for my wife's company. And the CEO talked about, cause it was during the recession, this was like 2011, he talked about how they needed to make sure that everybody stuck around and worked hard because of that. He took the Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours thing, and he was like, because we need the knowledge that is inside the workforce to help continue us. And then he launched into the celebrating of tenure milestones with people at the company. But that's almost like you're almost like trying to embed that, I mean, maybe purposefully or not, embed that into the organization with this cross-skilling and low turnover and everything else. There's all sorts of ancillary benefits of that tribal knowledge, if you will.

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Kevin Trowbridge (11:41): Yeah. And I mean, one big thing that we pride ourselves on is when people do leave, typically it's after five or six years. We're not talking about really quick turnover. We're talking about people work here for a long time and it's a place where people want to work. As the generation shift, I mean, as research has shown, younger generations are more apt to switch careers and switch companies. We have people that are part of those generations that have already been here 10 years and they're in their late twenties, because they started at 18, because they knew this was a good company. They knew what they wanted to do. They came here and they've already worked here a decade and they're still in their twenties, and they don't want to go anywhere and they really love it. They want to move up. We provide, through how we conduct our business, we provide a safe place to work. We provide a comfortable lifestyle and competitive pay. And there's so many positive things about working at Kimray that people just don't want to go anywhere else. There's nowhere else better, in our opinion, obviously, than working at Kimray.

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Logan (12:50): Yeah, but I mean, you're in a competitive market. It's not like you're the only employer in town. So.

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Kevin Trowbridge (12:54): Yeah. No, no, we have a few very large employers, other manufacturing companies very similar to us. And then other larger companies that do warehousing. I mean, Amazon. Amazon's everywhere. They take everybody. We aren't losing people to Amazon. We aren't losing people like other companies, because we're competitive and people like working here. So.

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Logan (13:20): And employment's a two-way street. Like, I lived in Europe for a while, and in Europe they have different labor laws and all that kind of stuff. And I'm in California, so we're at-will. And they were like, how is that even possible? And it's like, well, it's a two-way street. People leave for various reasons of companies, but if they stick around, like, clearly the company is doing something for them that keeps them there. And if you're having that kind of tenure and 3% turnover, I mean, in a generation that stereotypically has high turnover, it's a huge testament to the Kimray way.

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Logan (13:56): But I want to dive in a little bit. I could talk about the culture thing all day because, I mean, you see turnover and everything that goes on in the general population. But I want to talk a little bit about how you guys are using data in all of this. So you have low turnover, you have culture initiatives. And how are you pairing that down to the bottom line of the business? Because a lot of people that listen to this show are in, you know, private equity environments or high stakes environments where they're really trying to tie initiatives to EBITDA. And you guys do that.

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Kevin Trowbridge (14:32): Yeah. So one of our main focus, or pretty much our main focus for a lot of our bonus plans is EBITDA. This is what our bonuses are paid off. This is how we measure our achievement. And one way that we contribute to that, one of the great features that I love is the insights piece of HRBench that just got rolled out, and we're able to see kind of trends and it's able to point out outliers and things like that. But also, we're able to provide the turnover data. If our CEO's like, tell me the turnover in this area, or can we, just using turnover data, we just got our newest engagement survey results back. Can we tie the engagement results to our turnover level? And absolutely, you can see there's higher turnover where there's less engaged team members, and we're able to tie that together, and we're able to drill down and say, okay, what teams is it? Who is it? What can we do? How can we help those leaders get their team members more engaged? What's the feedback? And so we're able to take the data from HRBench, because it's real time, and provide that real time information to our leaders. Cost of turnover, how much it costs to replace somebody, and knowing that our turnover is so low, we're not having to pay as much. We're not having to go out and hire headhunters to be able to find people, because we can just post it and we'll get a hundred applications. And so having that metric, being able to pull, and it just keeps growing. That's the great thing about HRBench. The metrics, you just keep getting more and more and more. And we've been able to build dashboards that we didn't have before, dashboards that are live. We were trying to do some Tableau work in the past. And when we engaged with HRBench and got our information, got the feed set up, it was like, bam, done. I have, right now, I could pull it up and say, this is what it is up to this point. So.

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Logan (16:25): Yeah, that's cool. So you were building Tableau dashboards before, and you mentioned in one of our previous conversations that, I mean, not to make it a total plug, but when you brought HRBench in, it freed up time from your Tableau dashboards of regular to be able to go do deep dive stuff. What was that like, that shift?

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Kevin Trowbridge (16:42): Yes, man. The ability to have, so HRBench is great about providing, like, these are the most common metrics that you're going to need. So now we want to go look at absenteeism, so we're able to go into our system and pull what we need, because we don't have to run all these dashboards for everything else. We're not having to spend the hours to build the files and do everything. We can start digging into vacation usage. One topic that's been brought up was vacation and sick pay usage within the first 30, 60, 90 days of hire, and first 30, 60, 90 days after a person's anniversary when their bucket gets reloaded. Is everyone using all their stuff right up front, or is it spread out throughout the year? And so we've been able to dig into that. We've been able to, retirement forecasting things. I mean, just the number of dashboards we've been able to work on, because we aren't having to constantly update these other, you know, what would we consider basic dashboards, because HRBench does it and it's all there and it's all live. Man, the time savings that we've had has been huge.

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Logan (17:48): What was the reason for looking at the vacation usage, if you don't mind me asking? What was the question that you were trying to ask?

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Kevin Trowbridge (17:54): Yeah. So there was a time in our recent past history where people would get hired, and we are a company that kind of front loads your vacation. And we were looking at our vacation policy and looking at potentially switching to a PTO bucket instead of vacation and sick. And the reason we were looking at that is we didn't want to potentially front load everybody's PTO and then they take it all and then leave. So it was like, do we have the right policy? Are we balancing protecting the company with taking care of our team members? And so it wasn't rampant, but it was probably more at one point than we wanted it to be. And so it was just, can we make a good policy decision with additional data? And we had the time to dig into this and not have to worry about all these other dashboards. We don't have a whole separate person that's running just our dashboards. We are able to start working on this and do more in-depth, typically more difficult reporting, because all the basic and really high quality data is pulled out of HRBench.

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Logan (19:01): Yeah, what I like about it, I mean, I'm going to make the connection, I don't know if that's where you're going, but the ability to be able to take the time to have a data-backed decision and make, like, what's going to be best for the workforce and the organization collectively, and have the time to be able to use data to make those good decisions, so doesn't feel arbitrary. It's like, I think, cool.

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Kevin Trowbridge (19:25): Absolutely. I mean, it took us 20 minutes to run a report to pull the turnover by business unit and then every sub department. It took us 20 minutes to pull that together into a PowerPoint out of HRBench, when trying to do that in Excel with the graphs and everything would have probably taken us an hour or two to get it for every department. And we were able to do it in 20 minutes at our VP of HR's request. She was like, can you get this to me? Done. Send it over to her. She's like, this is great. And the ability to do that, that's an hour and a half of time that now we have to work on other things. And that's just huge. It has allowed us to dig into our system. It's allowed us to dig into, like I said, other more in-depth, more complicated analytics. And it's almost been a year that we've been with HRBench. And I don't think any of us would have thought we'd be this far on some of the things we're working.

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Logan (20:25): That's awesome. Now, you did provide, I think, access to HRBench to quite a bit of your team for their own use. And I want to talk about what that did for the team, but then also I'll ask a follow up question, but I'm going to precursor it so I don't forget, is how did people who aren't necessarily used to looking at data like that getting involved in the process? Because you come from compensation, so there's tons of data, and that's like a second language for you, maybe even first language, I don't know. But, yeah. So, is giving access to data like that do for the team internally?

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Kevin Trowbridge (20:58): Yeah, giving access, I think, one, it kind of opened their eyes to what all there was. Like, I don't think anybody grasped just how many HR metrics there are out there and what can be measured. I think that was the biggest thing. And then HRBench is so easy to work in, so intuitive, that it didn't overwhelm them. So they pulled it up and they have, you know, this whole headcount turnover metric and ATS data, and it's just section by section and they're not overwhelmed by it. They're like, okay, that makes sense. And then how you use it, super simple, super easy to work with. So our HR team, you know, they'll even admit themselves, they weren't the most data centric. Like, they're not the biggest fans of working in Excel, but man, when we showed them HRBench, like, this is amazing. We can go in and do this without needing to request it from somebody or go to IT to get them to run a report for us or any of that. We can just go get it ourselves. And here soon we're going to be giving access to our C-suite so that they can go in and see what we're seeing. And then hopefully soon we'll be able to give access to our VP level, the level below C-suite, so they can go in and say, how is my business unit doing? And the idea that I can go to our head of supply chain and say, here you go, and she can see just supply chain, and we're able to put those restrictions in and she can see her organization. I mean, I think they're going to be like, man. A lot of our VPs love data. And so they may spend a whole day just clicking around in HRBench. So.

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Logan (22:38): Yeah, that's the thing about, especially if you're like managing up to CCB or VP level, because they're all thinking about the business as a whole, that it's always data. There's always data having to go around. And I come from a marketing background, marketing struggles with this a lot of times, giving data to executives. And I feel like I kind of sit in between HR and marketing now, and I have empathy for that side of HR also having to do that equation. So it's awesome to hear that you guys are going to give access to C-suite, eventually VP level. What is your hope of that outcome?

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Kevin Trowbridge (23:22): They're more informed. That they are able to go and find answers themselves instead of, you know, having to email our PNC team who then emails us, or then goes in and looks. They can go in and say, okay, what is it looking like over the last three months? What's it looking like over the last year on our turnover? What's it looking like on our headcount? Because that's a huge thing. They have a headcount budget they have to stick to. What's my headcount out? We send out a weekly report right now, but man, it would be great to not have to send out a weekly report. If you want to know where it is, go in and find it, because it's updated every day, all the time. So the ability to do that, the time savings, not having to go in and run these reports again, we're going to have 30 minutes or an hour to be able to go do something else. So.

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Logan (24:08): Or 30 minutes to an hour to think about the results. Like, that's another big part, is you just having to think. I mean, I things time.

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Kevin Trowbridge (24:11): We can look at the trends. I mean, the ability to look at trend lines and look at the data over time, I think that will be huge for them. So it's just, it's really exciting.

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Logan (24:24): Awesome. Well, thank you, Kevin. I always love getting together and talking with you, and also with manufacturers. Like I said at the start, I have a bit of a soft spot for that. Is there anything else that you would like to leave the audience with today? Any advice on tying HR data to EBITDA or culture initiatives?

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Kevin Trowbridge (24:43): No, just don't be afraid to, you know, really dig into the analytics, dig into the numbers and use them, and, you know, help correlate things for your leaders, because they don't always see it, because like you said, they're always looking at the big picture as a whole. And being in the space that I'm in, it gives us the ability to help communicate a story. And I tell this to everyone, part of analytics is not just the numbers. It's telling the story behind the numbers, and having the ability to do that at the drop of a dime is such a huge thing. And being able to do that, it has been game changing for us here at Kimray.

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Logan (25:21): Awesome. Well, that is really great advice to leave the audience with. Where should people connect with you?

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Kevin Trowbridge (25:26): Yeah, so I'm on LinkedIn, Kevin Trowbridge, Kimray Inc., Director of Compensation, and that's pretty much the only social media I use. That, or Kimray, ktrowbridge@kimray.com. So feel free to shoot me an email or drop in on LinkedIn.

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Logan (25:41): Awesome. Well, thanks a lot, Kevin. I really appreciate the time, and this was a lot of fun.

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Kevin Trowbridge (25:45): Thanks, Logan, I appreciate it.

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Logan (25:46): Thank you for joining us for today's episode of Pulse, the podcast that has real conversations with HR leaders linking people to performance. HRBench is the people analytics platform that turns HR data into business strategy. It connects to all your tools, HRIS, ATS, payroll, surveys, whatever you're using. In just a few clicks, you get over 45 metrics instantly visualized in boardroom ready dashboards, benchmarked by industry and company size. Book a demo at HRBench.com and we'll build you a custom benchmark report using your data.