One way to judge a workplace is to look at what the company provides for the children of its employees. From that viewpoint, Fel-Pro in Skokie, Illinois, one of the world’s largest makers of gaskets for automobiles and industrial uses, may well qualify as the best employer in the land.
Benefits start at birth for Fel-Pro kids. Literally. On the day a child is born (or adopted), the company sends the mother flowers, gives the baby a pair of inscribed leather baby shoes, and enters a $1,000 savings bond in the baby’s name, payable on the child’s 21st birthday. When Fel-Pro kids turn 2, they are eligible to attend the professionally staffed Fel-Pro day-care center, located in a separate building adjacent to the company’s plant just north of Chicago. An old railroad caboose sits in the playground. After Fel-Pro kids start school, the company will send professionally trained caregivers to the home to take care of them if they get sick (at a cost to employees of only $16 a day). If the child is having difficulty in school, the company provides testing and individual tutoring (at an employee cost of $7 an hour). When they graduate from high school, the company sends them a $100 check. College? Fel-Pro offers them individual counseling in selecting their college, then the company provides all Fel-Pro kids attending college $3,000 a year (for four years) to help defray tuition costs.
For many Fel-Pro kids, summer is the best time of all. The summer day camp is held at the company’s own 220-acre Triple R recreation area (the Rs stand for rest, relaxation, and recreation). On summer mornings, yellow school buses wait at the factory to drive them 40 miles to Triple R Camp, with its staff of trained counselors, an Olympic-size swimming pool, arts and crafts classes, and other activities. (In 1991, five buses took 296 kids to Triple R every day.) What about summer jobs? Fel-Pro hires employees’ kids to work at the plant. In fact, virtually all temporary summer replacement jobs (usually about 150 positions) are filled by children of employees, called “future gasketeers” by other employees.
Employees talk about Fel-Pro as a big family. Lita Ignacio came to the United States from the Philippines 20 years ago and started working there in 1975 (about half of Fel-Pro’s employees are minorities). She said: “I feel like I belong to a family here. They treat us like their family.” She points to the day-care center, where two of her children went. “By having day care, it gives us confidence that our little ones are in good hands.” Her children also went to the summer camp. “I have the feeling that the management is always thinking of what they can give us more.”
There are other reasons why Fel-Pro workers talk about the company as a family. Many employees are second- and third-generation. Bob O’Keefe, vice-president of industrial relations, who has been with the company since 1946, is a good example. His three sons, one daughter, one cousin, and one son-in-law also work for the firm; his three daughters and one daughter-in-law worked there during college; and he has one grandchild in the day-care center. In fact, over half of all people who work at Fel-Pro are related to someone else in the company. And there are 109 Fel-Pro married couples. Even those who are not blood-related are considered kin, as Fel-Pro’s top corporate goal is “to promote a feeling that we are a corporate family,” according to the employee handbook.
The company started in 1918 when Hugo Herz and his son-in-law, Albert Mecklenburger, began making felt gaskets and washers for Ford Model T cars, under the name of Felt Products Manufacturing Company. Within a few years they were also making cork and paper gaskets as well as oil seals for automobiles. Today the firm is 100 percent owned and controlled by members of four families that are descendant from the founders. Mecklenburger’s own sons-in-law, Lewis Weinberg and Elliot Lehman, serve as co–chairmen emeriti. Mecklenburger’s grandsons (Dave and Ken Lehman) are co–chairmen; Paul Lehman is a co–president. The other co–president is Dennis Kessler, who married into the Weinberg family. Robert Morris, executive vice-president, and Richard Morris, assistant secretary, are descendants of Hugo Herz. These eight men constitute the company’s board of directors. Paul Lehman told us that many of the employee policies can be traced to his grandfather, “a modest, unassuming man who was known to be generous and compassionate.”
Fel-Pro’s employees work in an air-conditioned, 780,000-square-foot manufacturing and office complex in Skokie. Visitors immediately notice a 15-foot-high steel sculpture that depicts people holding huge gaskets. It was made by the firm’s resident sculptor, Ted Gall, who uses scrap metal and pieces of gaskets to create arresting sculptures placed throughout headquarters. The cafeteria, for instance, hosts a large copper sculpture portraying the history of Fel-Pro.
One of the central institutions at the company is the Employee Forum, which has met monthly since 1952. Each department elects its representative to the forum, chaired by one of the two company presidents. Any issue except compensation is fair game. The first part of each meeting is devoted to reporting on what was done about issues raised in the previous meeting. As Jeff Aull, a customer service representative, explained: “The forum is our voice.” John Kula, a sales engineer, added: “I know everything is going to be addressed. The answer may still be no, but I know it’s going through the system.” There’s a saying at Fel-Pro that the worst question you can have is the one you never ask.
According to president Paul Lehman, “The concept is that if you give people an opportunity to air the things they are concerned with and you take care of them; then the problems stay in their proper perspective.” Another advantage, Lehman said, is that “employees keep making suggestions because they know that somebody’s going to listen.”
In a forum meeting 20 years ago, employees asked to have the plant air-conditioned, and the company agreed (at a cost of about $1 million). When the issue of recycling was raised recently, a CAT, or corrective action team, was formed, composed of both management and employees, to explore ways to improve the company’s recycling efforts. Lehman said that the process is more collaborative today than in the past: “We are trying to make it more of a partnership instead of the old way of ‘employee proposes, management disposes.’ The new twist on it now is that it’s not enough just to make suggestions, we all have to solve the problems confronting us.”
Dick Johnston, director of corporate quality, contrasted Fel-Pro with his previous employers: “There’s more listening that goes on around here, more consideration of the needs and point of view of people both within and outside the company. That was being done here long before it was recognized to be in vogue in other places.” He found it remarkable how much access people had to top management. “If you come from another organization, it’s culture shock because there’s a trust element here. It takes a while to believe it.” Because people have so much direct access to top management, Johnston felt “it’s not an easy place to supervise, particularly at the beginning level and the middle levels. You have to develop a thick skin.” In the long run, he thinks it is worth it, since “it makes for more open communications, more understanding on the part of everyone as to what’s going on and what the real problems are.”
Fel-Pro has no executive cafeterias or washrooms or special parking slots. Top executives eat in the company cafeteria with other employees and appear to be on a first-name basis with a large percentage of the work force. They are frequently seen in the offices and on the plant floor kibitzing with employees. The top four officers share one secretary. Executives are expected to write their own speeches and memos, answer their own calls, and open their own mail.
John Barry, co–director of scrap production, recalled that his first boss told him that “the forum is the most important meeting we have each month within the organization. It takes top priority.” This surprised Barry, who had previously worked for seven years as a supervisor at an LTV steel mill. “There was no trust between the supervisors and the hourly people at LTV. The distrust was promoted, in fact, with separate lunchrooms and different colored hard hats. Coming here, there’s not even a separate parking space for the owner, for crying out loud.”
Besides the benefits for employees’ children, Fel-Pro offers everyone a mind-boggling array of unusual perks: an extra day’s pay on your birthday, on the anniversary date of your employment at Fel-Pro, and on June 1 (extra vacation money); a free lunch in the company cafeteria on your birthday; a $200 check in case of a death in the family (including siblings, parents, and parents-in-law); a $100 wedding check; a $1,000 check on retirement; free income tax preparation; your own mini-farm (a 20-foot-square plot of land at Triple R Camp with water and gardening tools); elder-care consulting and referral; eye care (a free eye exam and pair of eyeglasses every year); two free changes of work clothes annually; a generous profit-sharing plan; group auto insurance; a fully equipped and professionally staffed physical fitness center at the factory, and special holiday gifts:
- Valentine’s Day—a pound of Fannie May chocolates.
- Easter or Passover—a canned ham or kosher turkey.
- Mother’s Day—a potted plant (for everyone, mother or not).
- Father’s Day—belt buckles, ties, photo albums, and so on (again, no need to be a father).
- Thanksgiving—a can of pistachio nuts.
- Christmas—a turkey and a free Christmas dinner in the cafeteria.
Some outsiders may consider all these goodies paternalism. Fel-Pro has no unions and has never had a work stoppage. Employees proudly point to their willingness to put out extra effort when called upon. But none of the employees we talked with felt they had been bought off by the benefits. Susan Schmid worked summers for Fel-Pro while attending the University of Illinois with the help of the company’s scholarship assistance. Her father worked in the maintenance department, and she also has a brother-in-law with the company. Schmid insisted that she does not feel “manipulated” by the extensive benefits package: “It’s a two-way street. It’s a give-and-take situation. They’re flexible, and so you’re flexible. You give more naturally, not because you feel obligated to.” Lita Ignacio adds: “You feel that they care for you, so you have to care for them.”
Copresident Paul Lehman bridles at the depiction of Fel-Pro as paternalistic: “Paternalism connotes to me a real Big Brother, Big Sister idea.” Instead, he called Fel-Pro’s style a partnership, where “everybody has to participate to be the best company we can be.” He notes Fel-Pro has been profitable every year of its history and that it has had to fight to become the leading gasket maker in the United States. He characterized the benefits as a form of sharing the wealth with those who’ve helped to create it.
Jackie Kassouff, a manager in the cell manufacturing department, explained that although people worked hard at Fel-Pro, there was no pressure, unlike her previous experience in the software industry. With software companies, she said, “We prided ourselves on the number of ‘red-eye’ [flights] we would take per month and bragged about our 80-hour weeks. That is definitely not the case here. At one point soon after I got here, my boss sat me down and told me point-blank, ‘You’re working too many hours. We value you too much. You are getting burned out. Stop it. You can take no work home this weekend.’ And they were serious.”
According to Kassouff, there is “a holistic kind of feeling here about people. We do have demands made on us, and we have to pay attention to those. But we are people, too, and you have to pay attention to your personal life and your family.” She summed up the attitudes of many employees: “You feel like a real human being here when you come to work every day. And that is invaluable to me.”
Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz have written five books about business with a third author, Michael Katz. Their works include Everybody’s Business: A Field Guide to the 400 Leading Companies in America. This article is from The 100 Best Companies to Work For in America. Copyright �(c) 1993 by Robert Levering and Milton Moskowitz. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group Inc.
Fel-Pro Inc.
Business: One of the world’s largest makers of gaskets for automobiles and industrial uses.
Location: Skokie, Illinois.
Sales: $275 million.
Employees: 1,800.
Founded: 1918, by Hugo Herz and Albert Mecklenburger.
Board of directors: Members of four descendant families: Elliot Lehman, Ken Lehman, David Lehman, Paul Lehman, Lewis Weinberg, Dennis Kessler, Robert Morris, and Richard Morris.
Ownership: Spread among 20 members of the four families.
Claim to fame: Hailed as one of the most generous companies in America; it showers employees with benefits to create the atmosphere of a huge extended family, whose members return the favor with superior work.