Matt Vance: Welcome to the Culture Profit Podcast. I’m Your host Crista Vance, and I’m Your Co-host. Matt Vance, the Culture Profit podcast series. Obsessed with one question. How can culture drive greater profits joining us today? Is Scott Erickson. Human resource director at Campbell Scientific and International Leader in the Measurement and Control Industry. Founded in 1974, Campbell Scientific designs and manufacturers data acquisition systems for measuring weather, water energy, soil and so much more.

Matt Vance: Known for exceptional accuracy, and durability, Campbell scientific systems are used around the globe from the Arctic, to the tropics, high mountains, and desert. When doing some research, I saw that Campbell Scientific Products are used by the Professional Golf Association, for Lightning Warnings at Premier Gulf events, pretty cool. And the Panama government also uses their products to accurately measure the water level forecasting at the Panama Canal, very impressive. Thanks for being here with us Scott. We appreciate you taking some time out of your day.

Scott Erickson: thank you Crista and Matt for having me on, it’s exciting to be with you.

Matt Vance: Yeah, it’ll be good. Yeah, we want to get to know a little bit more about you And so Scott, he leads the global Human Resources Department at Campbell Overseeing people operations, for over 700 team members across 15 global locations prior to working for Campbell Scientific Scott worked as a regional HR manager at our Donnelly for 24 years leading the HR function for the Logan Utah site in addition to various regions in the Northwest Southwest Nevada, and California. Scott started his career in working as the human resources manager for the JR. Simplot Company and shortly after finishing college, he holds a bachelor’s degree from Utah, State University School of Business and Human Resource Management with minors, and economics in Spanish, Scott and Joy spending time with family college football, reading Fly, fishing and traveling. And I’m sure we’ll get to know you more here in our podcast today.

Matt Vance: And with that, we hear that you love to travel and we’ve heard that you recently got to go somewhere and we want to hear about where that was and what brought you to that place.

Scott Erickson: So for much of my career. It seems like I’ve worked in my travels around Utah, National Parks during Umea and spring break weekends with kids. But now that our kids are grown, we’re doing a little more travel and most recently, this January, we spent some time in Costa Rica and what took us to Costa Rica was the geeky hobby of birding,…

Matt Vance: Wow.

Scott Erickson: bird watching. Some may call it that we really, really enjoyed and were able to spend a half down there, chasing birds through the jungle and the cloud forest and that was just a wonderful experience.

Matt Vance: That sounds amazing. What was one of the top amazing birds that you saw?

Scott Erickson: Boy, we saw so many but, it’s hard to beat the resplendent quetzal of the cloud forests. We were able to see some of those and then over on the Osip Peninsula in Quercovado National Park, which is a really remote place. We were able to watch orange colored mannequins dancing, on their luck, trying to impress the females and that was really fun too.

Matt Vance: That’s awesome.

Scott Erickson: So yeah.

Matt Vance: Very impressive. I like it. Yeah, I’ve definitely never seen and What did you call it? Orange.

Scott Erickson: Orange colored mannequin. You’ve got to do it, Matt.

Matt Vance: orange colored. Mannequin, I’m writing it.

Scott Erickson: You would learn some dance moves.

Matt Vance: That’s exactly what I need, family dance parties, get the disco ball out and, turn on some ballerina music at our house with little girls. But yeah, that sounds awesome. I love it. So Scott,…

00:05:00

Scott Erickson: That’s it.

Matt Vance: tell us why you chose as your career

Scott Erickson: That’s a good question. It’s been so long ago. I can barely remember why? But As I was going to school, I knew I wanted to do something in business and

Scott Erickson: I’m mildly competitive and so I’ve always enjoyed the game of business and trying to win in the marketplace and the thought of companies and what they’re trying to accomplish, always intrigues me. And you always hear people or the most important asset of the company and

Scott Erickson: I think I grew to really believe that and felt like human resources was a way to influence the business to help when in the marketplace and doing it through working closely with the most important asset of the company, which is the people. And I think even in our technologically driven environment today, that still holds true that people make the difference and all of the activities that play into helping, bring people together into a strong culture, that’s productive and innovative, cool products, and makes a positive difference in the market. It’s very exciting. It’s never boring. There’s almost never one day, that’s just like the other. So I think the variety and the

Scott Erickson: And just the fact that every individual that you meet changes your life in some way because you learn something from everybody that’s kept it fresh for 33 years. I’ve been doing it.

Matt Vance: I like that, it’s interesting having a culture of products, services and people like what you’re talking about. I totally agree that people are the most important asset of the company. They are the company. Unlike the saying, first, the chicken, or the egg, which came first. The people are the product. I’ve never heard of a scenario where the products came before the people,…

Scott Erickson: Good.

Matt Vance: because it’s people creating the services. Even if the product is natural resources and it exists on the earth, the people are taking raw goods, and putting it in a form where it can add value. So, I think putting people first is critically important.

Scott Erickson: Absolutely.

Matt Vance: Yeah, and you mentioned, how you’ve believed that for a long time and kind of grown into that belief, that people are the asset of the company. And I’d love to hear from your perspective, your many years of experience, how you feel culture drives greater profits, how it impacts the business in that way.

Scott Erickson: Sure, That’s a really, really good question because I think a lot of times when we think of human resources and some of what we call soft skills. There’s questions about how that links to profit and I think we tend to measure a lot of what we call people metrics here at Campbell Scientific. And there are things like turnover and retention.

Scott Erickson: Definitely, revenue per employee. We Return maps on products, and Net promoter scores from employees. And so,

Scott Erickson: As you think about, how does the culture, the product or excuse me, how does it drive the profits? We have what we call a success cycle that we look at and calibrate with fairly regularly and that’s a success cycle. It has to start somewhere. And I think every company in some way, shape, or form,

Scott Erickson: Tries to strike the balance between, What are the needs of the employees and the shareholders, which comes first, and what do you prioritize? And if you’re in difficult times, which one gets first in line and our executive team, we have an amazing executive team that Campbell Scientific and our CEO in particular has had this conversation with me that there’s a fundamental belief, that not be an engaged employees produce, amazing products and processes and services which leads to happy and loyal customers and solid financial return, which then feeds and helps keep those happy engaged employees happy for the long term and…

00:10:00

Matt Vance: Yeah.

Scott Erickson: that so the cycle for us starts with the employees and there’s faith that it will lead to amazing products and processes customers will

Scott Erickson: Feel better about spending their money on our products and having our products and keeping money in their bank accounts. And then that in turn gives us a solid financial return of the three invested back into the employees and the company. So, and if you look at every step of that from the net promoter scores to quality metrics to financial metrics, that culture can tie into all of those areas of profitability.

Matt Vance: I love the thought of it being a very cyclical process that everything fuels the other parts of the business and I’d love to hear what that looks like at Campbell Scientific. What ways do you guys implement that try and increase your employees happiness?

Scott Erickson: Yeah, there’s so many ways that I would never leave everybody to believe that everybody’s happy every day as much as we try and as much as we would like that to be, I think humility and the sense of knowing that you can continually improve is probably at one of the roots of a strong culture that you don’t ever have it figured out or have it down, but that you are continually trying to, identify things that you can do better. Some of the things that we do here that I think are influential on the culture.

Scott Erickson: These employee huddles where we try to keep employees at the center of what’s going on, rather?

Scott Erickson: Then at the periphery wondering what’s going on and our CEO takes a huge amount of that responsibility upon his own shoulders to be out front and visible with the employees, keeping them informed about what’s going on with the business. There’s probably a lot of people that could deliver that message, but he likes to own that message and be accountable for that message. So he leans on others to participate in those huddles. But there’s a strong sense of his leadership and his voice and those huddles so that the employees are connected to the top of the organization. the questions are always welcomed and addressed There’s a lot of little things that are done here, We

Scott Erickson: We strive to have a benefit package. That’s, focused on the being of our employees and their families, that gives them less to worry about when they’re not at work so that they’re taken care of and that’s always a balance with the financial side of providing those benefits. We do a lot of activities with our employees. We do things, like midweek mingles, to try to just pull away from work for a few minutes in the middle of the week. Bring people together in common spaces and share a short experience together and then go back to work and those things can be powerful. Lots of training and development that happens. I think one of the things that we try to do is try to choose leaders that get a lot of personal satisfaction out of seeing other people grow.

Scott Erickson: And we’ve tried to build our communication processes, our review processes around, not only performance but also engagement to have employees, giving us feedback on how engaged they are with the business. And what their needs are balanced with the performance reviews of where we talk about their performance and how they can strengthen and be a valuable asset to the organization. So I think all of those things play into the Culture. I think leaders that have their heart into it that communicate are interested in the growth and development of the employees. I think those are some of the things that are at the core of our culture initiatives

00:15:00

Matt Vance: Agriculture business. Yeah, it’s not always just derived from one thing, right? And the very first thing you mentioned was communication and it sounds like Campbell Scientific has done a great job of just communicating to their employees that they cared about and I think that’s huge.

Scott Erickson: Yeah, it is. And, once I reported to our chief financial officer, He said something once that really stuck with me. He said that when people come into your organization, they’re gonna bring whatever culture they have with them. And that. if you don’t have a culture that assimilates them,

Scott Erickson: Then you get what you get and other people have said, that culture develops with, without conscious effort. And so, we try to be intentional about our culture. So that if you ask somebody, how it feels to work at Campbell Scientific or what a day in the life of a Campbell scientific employee is that you’ll get a consistent message that it’s a great experience because if you don’t intentionally go out and create that, it’ll rise up and become something that you want, maybe something that you don’t want, but

Scott Erickson: But there’s ways to influence it and I think it starts with bringing in good people and getting the most out of them allowing them to be their cells. But having some common language and common principles that are understood from the top down and the bottom up that everybody agrees to and living by those, all the time. I think Clayton Christensen, he was a Harvard professor that died not too long ago. He wrote a book about How you will measure your life, which is a really good read. He talks about the importance of principles and solid principles that you stick to a hundred percent of the time and that if you shift to 97 or 98 then they begin to erode. So anyway those are a few thoughts.

Matt Vance: It’s like a great read. I’ll definitely have to check that out. And one thing I wanted to emphasize from what you’re telling us here Scott, I love how you emphasize the point of being humility or having humility and understanding that no organization is perfect, that not everyone can be perfectly happy in any given moment.

Scott Erickson: Not.

Matt Vance: And then you went on to list several different attributes that are present in the Campbell scientific culture from communication to a well-thought-out benefits strategy, to activities that can help link, and foster positive relationships and hiring, and promoting leaders who are people first, and who care about the success and growth of others. But even with all that said, Maybe there’s an employee of Campbell Scientific listening to this exact episode and they say I disagree with some of this and what I’ve seen from helping lead other organizations through company, culture, transformations is

Matt Vance: You have to be intentional with that communication and sharing almost like a roadmap for your culture of what you’re doing now and what you’re doing next to continue improving, and what that does is it puts the culture, the top, then it gets addressed in the

Matt Vance: Right order. So I just loved that almost caveat to say, Hey, we’re not perfect because anybody who says that, there’s a problem underneath So I tell you started there that really settled a lot and…

Scott Erickson: Yeah.

Matt Vance: helped me feel even more confident with what you said to describe the culture.

Scott Erickson: Yeah, I appreciate that, Matt, and your thoughts are very well articulated. When you talk about the roadmap one of our mantras here is that we do things that make a difference. the technology as you mentioned that we build and sell that sits on top of Mount Everest and all the way into Death Valley and the far reaches of the world. But the big thing that makes a difference is our CE. This is a little booklet that he authored. that I think is a really good roadmap worldwide globally.

00:20:00

Matt Vance: What is the name of that? Scott just for our listeners that don’t see the screen?

Scott Erickson: It’s called make,…

Scott Erickson: it’s called making a difference, our circuits and source code for making a difference. So that’s kind of our roadmap for how we make a difference in the world but it’s about people and it has stories of history. The company that started with some people that dream like children work like farmers and thought engineers and created a company with a few people out of a garage and grew it to go into 16 different countries. And now we’ve acquired a couple of other companies but some of those same founding principles that came from that farming family. The Campbells are what continue to drive us today.

Matt Vance: Making a difference.

Matt Vance: That is fantastic and quite a legacy. So Scott, you mentioned that there have been some acquisitions in the more recent history of Campbell Scientific. Let’s kind of shift gears and talk about that a little bit. Tell us how you merge company culture when bringing a new organization into the business. What do you intentionally change and what do you intentionally do? Leave the same.

Scott Erickson: Yeah, That is a really great question and I don’t know that I have the complete answer but again, I think there’s some principles that we can. fall back on to guide us as we’re trying to do that right now.

Scott Erickson: I think one of the things we’ve looked at is all three. We’ve got three companies here in the United States that we’ve brought together and I’ll say they’re a family of companies. but they each have their own customer bases, their own employees, past their own culture, that’s developed and as we’ve bought them and tried to bring them together. What, we’ve tried to I think allow them to maintain their own personality and their own

Scott Erickson: Their own leadership ideas but we’ve also tried to bring together our approach. We haven’t changed the company values of any of the three, but we’ve tried to find the common ground in the values. and looking for that common ground trying to grow, based on filtering our decisions through those values. Another thing we’ve done, is we’ve looked at things leadership training we do, we’ve tried to implement it more globally. Everything in terms of benefits, we’re trying to shape it globally. That means compensation systems and plans are global.

 the focus on that I think is the principle that we want to. We want to just some degree win together and lose together. We want to support those companies. Just like we do our own and we want success to be something that if we profit as an organization, we share that profit back with our employees. We continue to invest in research and development and innovation, but we’re still trying to figure that out. We know that we’ve got a lot of work to do, and

Scott Erickson: But I think the one thing that I found so far is that when you go and you spend time together eyeball to eyeball in a room and you work on the problems together, it seems like more often than not you find out that you’ve got more in common than you do. With differences. And once you can agree on that common ground, then you work together to solve the problems and to try to become one. So,

Matt Vance: I like that. It seems smart to not try to force all the employees from different companies to assemble into one, value system or anything like that. I mean, I know with my personality, I think I would kick back against that and I think a lot of people would But just focusing on those commonalities and then eventually I think you just become more united over time as you just felt as you’re focusing on that and increasingly, I think adding the training, no one can really be upset about doing training and improving themselves, but as you continue to do that and improve, you become more unified over time.

00:25:00

Scott Erickson: Yeah, great point Kristin and, one of the things is because I’m probably more connected to the human resources side of those acquisitions. But one of the things we’ve done, that’s a little bit out of the box, we’re still a pretty small company, all things considered. And so it’s not like we’ve got a great big headquarters environment where you can have, headquarters head count that, as every function, figured out, and that specializes in that function. But rather, we’ve got a pretty small group of people that have a variety of skills. And what we’ve tried to do is we’ve tried to look at our collective group as one group of human resource professionals and leverage the strength of the different people. So that we’ve got, people from one side of the organization that are not only doing their day today and their site but they’re leading globally in.

Scott Erickson: Functional responsibilities that they have good experience in. And I think by dividing up some of those functional responsibilities and having the leadership of human resources and the global decisions that we’re making inside the US and outside the US coming from, different sites. I think that’s helped bring us together too because it’s not one site controlling everything. There’s a lot of delegation of responsibility and authority and yes, we do have a headquarters but it’s just like all the other sites. So we’re working together to figure things out and I think it’s as simple as can be. But

Scott Erickson: FaceTime every week and we use technology for that most the time, but making time every week for every single direct report and every one that’s leading those functional teams to just calibrate and make sure we’re moving down a path together and on the same page and based on the values and principles of the company that’s really helped us to I think accelerate our performance. and we’re not there yet, but we’ve got good traction and we’re moving in a good direction.

Matt Vance: Makes a lot of sense and I think that communication is key especially when you’re bringing entire organizations together, to align, on certain components of how you operate. So having that FaceTime to strengthen relationships and increase trust that also helps increase business performance as well. So I think that’s fantastic. We’re so glad that you could be here with us, Scott, to tell us a little bit more about your experience, leadership and what’s happening at Campbell Scientific? Thank you for being here. And to all of our listeners, we’re grateful for you joining us as well. Thanks for tuning in. Thanks so much Scott.

Scott Erickson: Thanks for having Appreciate your time Crista and Matt, it’s good to be with you.

Matt Vance: You bet we’ll see. Bye.