Greif Takes Care of Colleagues, Communities and the Planet
Greif Inc., one of Newsweek's 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces 2023, is a 146-year-old leading supplier of innovative, sustainable industrial packaging that impacts your everyday life, from your e-commerce boxes to your food to the lubricants in your car.
You're likely surrounded right now by items that once lived in Greif's products. Yet chances are you've never even heard of the company. "We're one of America's best-kept secrets," said Bala Sathyanarayanan, executive vice president and chief human resources officer at Greif.
Greif emerged as a small, family-owned business in 1877 in Cleveland, Ohio, and quickly grew into one of the world's largest producers of barrels and casks. From there, through a series of acquisitions, along with growth driven by its focus on customer service and, more recently, a relentless dedication to sustainability, Greif has emerged as the global company it is today, with over 220 locations in more than 35 countries, from the U.S. and Mexico to Brazil, Germany, France, Israel and Malaysia, to name a few.
Greif's purpose is to create packaging solutions for life's essentials. These positively impact a diverse set of industries from health and beauty to retail to beverages to mining, petrochemicals, perfumes and agriculture. This year, Greif celebrated Food Safety Day with an emphasis on its food-safe packaging.
But for its 13,000 employees, or colleagues, as Greif refers to them, the company is more than just a packaging supplier or place to work. It's where they feel "safe, welcome, celebrated and cherished," said Sathyanarayanan.
These are a few of the many reasons why Greif was highlighted as one of Newsweek's 100 Global Most Loved Workplaces 2023. It's also why its Gallup engagement scores routinely fall in the top quartile when benchmarked against manufacturing companies worldwide.
Taking Care of Individuals
According to Sathyanarayanan, there are a multitude of reasons Greif is so loved by its colleagues. But perhaps the most critical one is its emphasis on "servant leadership" and its people-first approach.
"The way we view leadership here at Greif is we as leaders exist to serve our colleagues," said Sathyanarayanan. "The more successful they are, the more successful our customers are. And when we enable their success, we get more opportunities to serve. It's all connected."
The underpinnings of servant leadership manifest in key ways throughout all levels of the organization. Among them are employee benefits that offer opportunities for continuing education through the Greif University (an online and virtual program with more than 23,000 different courses available), scholarships to help colleagues' children with college tuition, and various local incentives.
Greif also has built-in structures and processes designed to create pathways for colleagues who want to advance in their careers. These include assigning colleagues a mentor and a sponsor (in addition to their manager) to help provide additional opportunities for learning and growth, as well as to connect colleagues to advocates throughout the organization. This has been so successful that, according to Sathyanarayanan, many of the company's employees end up being promoted and grow rapidly into their roles.
Taking Care of Its Communities
In the last handful of years, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) have been the focus of CEOs and HR executives. Yet for many, DEI has been little more than a buzzword—window dressing designed to create an illusion to hide the lack of substance and meaningful action behind the term. But Greif has been relentlessly committed to creating a diverse workforce and fostering a culture of diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging.
"We focus on DEI because it's the right thing to do," said Sathyanarayanan. To that end, the company created an educational program for all managers to provide them with the tools and knowledge to understand diversity and help foster a safe, inclusive community for all.
"We're here to create an environment where everyone can feel safe, everyone can feel welcome, everyone can feel celebrated, and everyone can feel cherished," said Sathyanarayanan. "If those four things happen, you feel like you belong."
Greif also supports six different employee resource groups geared toward different communities, including women, Latinx, Blacks and African Americans, Asians, LGBTQIAP+ and NextGen. Each group is managed and run by its own members and supported by an executive sponsor who directly reports to Ole Rosgaard, president and CEO of Greif.
These groups provide associates a place to connect with others with similar backgrounds and life experiences and ensure colleagues have a direct line to leadership, giving them a voice for surfacing important issues and ideas. The resource groups also host educational events for the rest of the company, so all can learn from their lived experiences. More recently, three executives who are members of the women's group spoke about self-advocacy and resiliency.
According to Sathyanarayanan, 10 percent of Greif's colleagues belong to one of these resource groups. And Sathyanarayanan and Rosgaard make it a point to check in with them, hosting roundtable discussions with group members via Zoom to listen and connect personally to understand and meet them where they are. Said Sathyanarayanan, "We want to communicate clearly to them that we are there for them, so they know they have the highest level of support."
Taking Care of the Planet
Greif also recognizes that taking care of the planet isn't a luxury but a necessity when it comes to looking after its people. Its ambitious 2030 sustainability goals include going zero waste at 97 percent of its facilities and also making 100 percent of its products recyclable. (Recyclable content targets for Greif's products are minimum averages, benchmarked across a portfolio of materials and products by weight, consolidated at a company level.)
"Greif's sustainability journey has changed over time," said Aysu Katun, vice president of sustainability at Greif. "When we first started, we focused solely on environmental, climate-related issues. Over time, it's grown and expanded to include key issues such as labor practices, human rights, innovation and supply chain."
Greif includes its initiative to close the gender pay gap under its sustainability goals. "We have to develop the right talent today and invest in them for the future so we can be sustainably successful," said Sathyanarayanan.
Running a business sustainably is a challenge, as Katun acknowledged readily. "It changes so fast that there's always something new happening," she said. "And it doesn't get any easier." But Greif has proven again and again that it's up to the challenge.
For instance, during a particular manufacturing process, the company was producing a small amount of waste in the form of waxed paper tubes—so small it couldn't even get a vendor to pick it up for recycling. But even this amount was too much. The teams put their heads together and came up with a simple but sophisticated solution: to partner with other local sites to ship the paper tubes on trucks that were otherwise empty and to store the tubes until they had enough for a recycling vendor to come get them.
In another instance, Greif wanted to extend the life cycle of its plastic jerrycans. They could only be recycled once before the quality of the material degraded, and it had to be downcycled. So Greif developed a method of manufacturing that preserved the quality of the plastic pellets through the recycling process, allowing them to be recycled multiple times without the material becoming downcycled.
Greif's focus on sustainability is also important for attracting and engaging employees, Katun underscored. "Especially the younger generations are really concerned about sustainability," she said. "More than ever, sustainability is important for attracting good talent and retaining them over time."
Katun and her team also work hard to connect sustainability as a corporate goal to the individuals who work at Greif—and beyond. It has held contests to encourage people to see how much they can reduce their energy at home. It holds sustainability training sessions and uses these opportunities to learn about issues and generate ideas with the people in the facilities. Greif also gives out annual sustainability awards to teams who ideate and put into action key sustainability initiatives throughout the organization.
"When colleagues can see the company is taking action, it makes them feel proud of where they work," said Katun. "When they're able to come up with their own ideas and implement them, it creates even more engagement because they know they're making a difference."
The company's success and its Newsweek ranking are based on a combination of savvy ingredients. These begin with leadership who value authenticity and diversity. Greif's focus on providing customer- and colleague-centric solutions and world-class service, along with its unflagging drive for innovation, contribute to its being a leading company, not just for today but for generations to come.
