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Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP)

Mary’s Gone Crackers Drives employee engagement by Fostering a High-Performance Workplace Culture

With the help of: Manufacture Nevada

About

Mary’s Gone Crackers is a food manufacturer located in Reno, Nevada, with 200 employees. They bake organic, gluten free, vegan crackers, cookies and pretzels with whole grains, flours and seeds. Mary’s Gone Crackers creates amazingly good snacks using only whole, plant-based ingredients. Their products are minimally processed from consciously and sustainably sourced ingredients. They believe the healthy choices they make for our bodies should also be healthy for the planet. Mary’s Gone Crackers plans to continue sourcing rice and other ingredients sustainably to minimize our ecological footprint and achieve our long-standing goal of manufacturing delicious, sustainably sourced snacks.

The Challenge

Mary’s Gone Crackers employs a diverse and highly motivated workforce. The management team is comprised of both US and Japanese leaders. Through an employee engagement survey, MGC discovered a feeling of segregation between the leadership and subordinates. First, they wanted to create a sustainable cultural understanding between the US and Japanese team, then they wanted to address sensitivity and diversity in the workplace, and finally they wanted to provide leadership training for all the management teams from the executive team to higher level management, mid-level management, and down to line management to achieve a consistent workplace culture. For help the company turned to Manufacture Nevada, part of the MEP National Network™.
Excellent expertise and quality of instructors. Very impactful and meaningful training courses for our workforce. I think this course was extremely important to our development at Mary’s Gone Crackers.
— Amy Currier, Human Resources Director

MEP's Role

Through a series of engagements including sensitivity and diversity awareness, US and Japanese culture emphasizing generational difference, and creating a high-performance workplace culture, Manufacture Nevada helped shape the culture with leadership experts that we able to engage the entire management team. Manufacture Nevada delivered a 4-hour facilitated session with the senior leadership team and a 12-hour leadership development program for 20 managers and supervisors.

These trainings fostered a shared vision of leadership aligned with MGC’s mission, vision and values and created collective accountability for working toward that vision. Through these "leadership guiding principles" the teams established operating/behavioral agreements for how members of MGC management will lead at MGC. The groups also worked to build and strengthen leadership capacity among MGC managers and supervisors on key leadership skills, including communication, situational leadership, conflict management, feedback, performance management and delegation.

 

Created July 13, 2023