Building a culture that endures across time and distances

A look into how Love’s Travel Stops instills its values across the company.

Company culture is an easy term to throw around, but it’s much harder to actually make an impact. The best organizational cultures are those that reflect the overarching mission of the company and the employees that make up the workforce in an intentional way.

At Ragan’s Employee Experience Conference at Disneyland in California this August, Jenny Love Meyer, chief culture officer at Love’s Travel Stops, will share her insights on how her family-owned business has cultivated a people-first atmosphere that’s carried on for over six decades.

“We’re a family business and maintaining our culture isn’t something we view as optional,” Love Meyer told Ragan. “It’s foundational in terms of who we are.”

She added that culture at Love’s Travel Stops doesn’t exist in a vacuum — it’s part of the company’s ethos and very existence. Whether it’s listening ears from leadership at one of the many store locations or filming and sharing the day-to-day experiences of what life at Love’s is like, the company works to both show and tell its people and the world what kind of workplace it is.

Building a culture that resonates

Love Meyer shared that her company sets the foundation for its employee culture from the moment a prospective employee begins the interview process. She said that creating a structure of carefully planned touchpoints in which the company’s culture can embed itself for new employees helps instill the values of Love’s early and often.

“From the recruiting process to onboarding, training and recognition, we embed our culture whenever we can along the employee journey,” Love Meyer said. That comes in many forms and focuses on the details of the language shared with both prospects and employees that emphasize focus on the wellbeing of both employees and the critical role they play in the business’s success.

Love added that it’s important for internal communicators to be consistent in supporting the company’s cultural values for all employees at all times. That uniformity helps maintain a positive employee experience, no matter the role or experience level of the employee in question.

Love Meyer shared some of those values with Ragan, including:

• Focus on the customer in everything we do.
• Exhibit integrity in our day-to-day actions.
• Demonstrate a strong work ethic.
• Create new opportunities through innovative thinking.
• Persevere in the pursuit of all opportunities.

“That consistency of culture and how we talk about it helps our people understand what this is really all about,” Love Meyer said.

Bringing listening on the road

 When you’re part of a widely dispersed company, creating unified cultural comms can prove challenging. With over 600 locations in 42 states, Love’s Travel Stops takes its culture comms on the road to conduct listening tours. These help Love Meyer and her team gather comments and suggestions for improvements directly from employees. She said that the visibility of leadership plays a major part in successful listening initiatives.

“Our culture tours are about showing up and shutting up,” Love Meyer said. “You can’t build a culture without listening at scale.”

Love Meyer said that there’s also an internal comms element to the company’s culture tours. A member of the internal comms team travels with Love Meyer to each stop on the tour, documenting the experience on video. This allows team members all across the company to see how each location is united under the common culture of the brand. The videos feature Love Meyer visiting store locations and focus on different company values including listening, innovation and stability. They also include interviews with employees to learn from their experiences at individual Love’s locations. In addition, the company instituted employee recognition programs and the idea station, a place for employees to share their perspectives on improving processes with leaders.

“You need to be intentional and strategic about your cultural storytelling,” Love Meyer said. “If I went in and talked with one group of stores and didn’t document it, people in that area would know what was going on, but the rest of the organization wouldn’t.”

Keeping things fresh and looking outward from internal comms

Love Meyer said that while the cultural tour video series is a great way to inform the entire company of what’s going on in far-flung locations, one major obstacle is creating content that’s varied enough to keep things interesting for the audience. In response to this factor, the internal comms team does an annual comms refresh to keep the content employees receive engaging and relevant. This helps avoid messaging fatigue and can serve to boost interaction with the series.

“Even if the store-to-store content is similar, we give it a yearly refresh to keep things engaging,” she said. “You can’t repeat the same thing over and over and expect it to resonate.”

She added that while the main audience for the culture tour series is Love’s Travel Stops employees, the comms team knows that the reach of these videos goes far beyond that. And that’s by design. For instance, the comms team uses a mixternal approach for the culture tour video series and focuses the content itself on employees, but posts it to YouTube for the public to see and interact with.

Another example is the “Your Story Matters” campaign. The video series is hosted on YouTube and TikTok and shares the stories of employees in both long and short-form video. The varied formats allow a wider swath of the public (and employees themselves) to learn about life working at Love’s.

“We know that the internal team members are the primary audience,” Love Meyer said. “But really, consumers are another one. It’s important to remember that consumers care about how organizations are run.”

Sean Devlin is an editor at Ragan Communications. In his spare time he enjoys Philly sports and hosting trivia.

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