Team members are a lot more than just employees at Priority Roofing; they are family. Here, Vice President Micah McQueen shares more about what it means to be a ‘priority family’, and how he has helped build success across 10 company locations.
Hiring the right people is not only crucial for the success of your business, it’s crucial for the success of your employees. According to Gartner, employees seek personal value and purpose at work, and as a business owner, it is your responsibility to deliver.
Micah McQueen, the Vice President of Priority Roofing, knows this all too well. He has played an important role in the expansion and growth of the business across its 10 locations: Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Tyler, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, California, and Denver. This while helping create an environment in which people enjoy working.
So how exactly do you deliver value to your employees so they can, in turn, add value to your company? It all starts with your company culture.
“Having a healthy culture inside the office with people that are integral and honest, makes customer service easy. We want to be the best in our cities and best in our states, and so much of that comes from having a healthy culture internally and having those healthy expectations,” says McQueen.
A healthy work environment is one where employees feel valued, safe, comfortable, and flush with opportunities for growth. Survey Monkey, in partnership with the professional career website Ladders conducted a study to learn more about employees’ career decisions. The results suggest that a happier work environment makes for more productive employees. Managers who have successfully created happy work environments had continuously monitored and responded to employee satisfaction levels.
If you are not focused on making sure that your employees are happy in their jobs and with your company, then you may also find that you are having difficulty retaining employees and attracting the most qualified ones.
Beyond just an interview, putting time and work into finding people that align with your company’s values will improve your chances of hiring the best performers and avoiding costly and painful mistakes.
Since 2018, McQueen has helped to create an effective hiring process that is used across all 10 locations to produce what he refers to as a ‘priority family.’
“Priority family means everyone from myself to our office staff, our CIO, our sales reps, our construction crews, our operations teams, and our customers. We want everyone to feel like they are part of a family. Not just any family because there are dysfunctional families in the world, but a very healthy family in which we value and respect one another and try to build each other up. I think having an inside-the-office family culture makes it easier to communicate a healthy culture outside the office,” he explains.
Priority Roofing has a very thorough interview process. Well-trained managers are determined to ask the right questions, so they can hire people who already have the type of values they want. McQueen believes that you can’t train people to have certain values, which is why it starts with hiring and recruiting.
“That's not to say that everybody believes the same thing,” McQueen discusses. “There is a tremendous amount of diversity, but the general consensus of what are good values, what is integrity, what is honesty, and more, these are things we seek during the very beginning of every recruiting process. We want people that are family-oriented and care more about doing what's right for their customer than about making a few extra dollars.” He continues, “When it comes to training, it’s just a matter of continuing to emphasize these values.”
“At Priority Roofing, we invest more in our people than anyone else in the industry,” McQueen says proudly. “We have a very comprehensive training and onboarding program with a thorough curriculum. The same training is given across all of our locations. I think that this type of investment up front means that we have quality people working for us, and they stay working for us. This in turn impacts our customers as they discover that they are working with good people and working with a company that's going to be here for a long time,” McQueen emphasizes.
“We want our customers to really believe in us. Much of our business comes by word of mouth. Consequently, it’s very important to us that every customer has an amazing experience. We do everything we can to make sure that happens,” he concludes.
If you found value in what you read here and would like to learn more about Micah McQueen or Priority Roofing, visit their website and see how they can serve you in Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, Tyler, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City, Kansas City, California, Denver, and beyond.
Written in partnership with Mindful Agency