Summit Hill Foods

Jason Marion is vice president of human resources at Summit Hill Foods, where he helped establish and is a champion for sustaining a high-performance workplace culture built on trust, employee involvement and continuous improvement. His work reflects the company's long-standing belief that valuing people is central to building a successful business.

Giving Family Values a Practical Purpose

In the early 1990s, Summit Hill Foods, then known as Southeastern Mills, was growing rapidly. Our owners wanted to preserve the family values behind the business: trust, respect for safe people and products and commitment to the community. The goal was to ensure these values shaped how employees were treated, not just what the company stood for.

In 1994, we introduced our High-Performance Workplace philosophy to put those values into practice. Its eight elements include trust, positive assumptions about people, eliminating negatives, training and development, open communication, employee involvement, competitive wages and benefits, and performance improvement. Trust means giving employees responsibility rather than micromanaging them. Valuing people means listening to their concerns, supporting their development and removing practices that make them feel undervalued.

Every new hire completes a five-day orientation workshop to understand these principles and how they guide our workplace. We also assess values alignment alongside technical skills when hiring, because building this culture requires people who embrace trust, mutual respect and shared responsibility.

Changing What Employees Usually Experience

Our culture workshops helped us identify everyday practices that made employees feel undervalued. One example was the time clock. Employees told us that punching in and out made them feel we did not trust them to keep track of their own hours. We removed the time clocks and asked employees to track and submit their hours electronically. It was a simple change, but it showed that we took their feedback seriously and were willing to change how we operated.

We saw a similar inconsistency in workplace access. A security guard employed through an outside agency had keys to every door, while our own employees did not have keys to the front door. We questioned what that said about the trust we placed in our people. We gave employees keys to the doors they needed to access and engraved each key with the word trust. The change made our philosophy tangible by giving employees both access and responsibility.

“When you create an environment that has positive assumptions about the people you work with, involves them in decisions that affect them and creates a high-trust environment, people don’t want to miss work.”

Compensation offered another opportunity to align our practices with our beliefs. We moved to an all-salaried approach across our workforce while retaining overtime eligibility for non-exempt employees. We wanted to recognize that employees have bills to pay, children to care for and family emergencies to manage. Treating people as adults meant acknowledging those responsibilities and extending trust beyond the workplace.

Accountability without Micromanagement

Some managers worry that paying employees during reasonable absences will encourage absenteeism. Our experience has been different. Absenteeism has remained below one percent for more than 25 years, while turnover has generally stayed in the low single digits for three decades. During COVID-19, turnover reached approximately nine percent, unusually high by our standards.

I attribute these results to our culture as a whole, not to any single policy. Training, communication, employee involvement, competitive compensation and continuous improvement all contribute to the environment we have built.

Trust does not mean lowering expectations. A high-performance workplace requires self-accountability, team accountability and a willingness to improve. We aim to move away from a top-down, “do as I say” management style toward an adult-to-adult environment where employees have a voice and understand their responsibilities.

Our approach has also attracted attention beyond the company. Faculty at the University of Virginia's Darden School of Business developed case studies about Summit Hill Foods for MBA and executive education programs. At a workshop led by Stephen Covey, author of The Speed of Trust, I was asked to list examples of trust in my workplace. My list extended onto a second page, and Covey later invited me on stage to discuss our practices with the audience.

That experience reinforced my belief that culture becomes credible when people can point to the decisions and practices that bring it to life.

Culture as a Business Ingredient

Our experience has shown me that workplace culture cannot be sustained through statements of values alone. It requires leaders to listen to employees, reconsider practices that make them feel undervalued and act on what they learn. It also requires clear expectations and accountability at every level.

At Summit Hill Foods, we manufacture food, but we believe culture is the main ingredient in a successful business. Trust is not simply something we ask employees to give us. It is something we demonstrate through our decisions, the responsibility we place in people's hands and the way we respond when they speak up. When our practices reflect our values, employees have a stronger reason to contribute to the company’s success.