Accelerating professional growth of a Fortune 250 company whose roots go back to 1834 is a heavy lift, which means any momentum picked up along the way is worth its weight in gold … or copper as it were.
Today, the company is marking the first-year anniversary of that momentum now known as Freeport Edge. Introduced in the fall of 2020, the set of five behaviors is intended to combine an agile way of working with the company’s existing high-performing culture to provide a competitive edge.
With a playbook that includes Aim High, Pursue Value, Collaborate as One Freeport, Empowered to Act, and Develop and Coach Our People, employees have been using these behaviors in their everyday work for the past year.
“For me, the results are important, but that’s secondary in my mind,” said Josh Olmsted, President and Chief Operating Officer-Americas. “The success for me is seeing the way the organization is starting to look at how we work rather than only what we work on. The Freeport Edge behaviors embody that. Seeing that trickle through the organization and the excitement from employees has been the most impactful part for me.”
Project Texas provides a jumpstart
As employees began actively living the behaviors, at least one site felt like it had a head start. In Bagdad, employees had been working since mid-2018 on a pilot called Project Texas, a precursor to the company’s Americas’ Concentrator effort.
Powered by Advanced Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and Agile – a method for maximizing the collaboration of the people performing the work – the premise of Americas’ Concentrator essentially was that the company could get all the benefits of building a new concentrator simply by maximizing the efficiencies of the existing facilities.
As a result of the work of Project Texas, Bagdad increased mill production and copper recovery. Not only did Bagdad’s production improve, so did safety performance. Aside from the measurable performance, site leadership also noticed a heightened level of collaboration and partnership among Bagdad employees.
“The Freeport Edge behaviors came out, and we were asked what that means to Bagdad,” said Justin Cross, General Manager-Bagdad. “Well, we use those all the time. What was neat is we went and did the work and then branded it, rather than brand it and figure out what it means.”
Looking back as the company concludes its first year of Freeport Edge, it’s the work of the Bagdad employees on Project Texas that provided the earliest indication the rest of the company also was ready to embrace the new behaviors. And it’s the continued adoption and practice of the behaviors by employees at all levels of the company that is demonstrating Freeport Edge is well on its way to changing the company for the better.
It’s the people
“Freeport Edge, at least in my mind, was a way of wrapping a story around some of the work we already were doing,” said Steve Higgins, Senior Vice President and Chief Administrative Officer. “It became increasingly clear to us that the special sauce that made all this work was the people. We needed data scientists, and we needed all the AI work, but really a whole lot was not going to happen if everyone wasn’t engaged in this.”
Freeport Edge behaviors didn’t happen quickly. Before there were Freeport Edge behaviors, there were North Star goals created through the Americas’ Concentrator effort. These first behaviors, combined with data from field surveys, helped create the five Freeport Edge behaviors, some of which were fairly new ideas to many employees.
“Part of this was introducing words into our vocabulary that everyone could use to describe what we had seen work so well,” said Shannon Lijek, Vice President, Transformational and Organizational Development. “We had lots of conversations on empower, and we were pretty excited about that word. Freeport Edge provided a whole new level of opportunity to engage in that concept and build upon the great culture that was already in place.”
Employees demonstrating behaviors
In a recent employee town hall, Olmsted framed much of the conversation within the company’s adoption of Freeport Edge. “If you think about it, those five behaviors and how they’re influencing the day-to-day work and how we do our work has been really impressive,” he said.
In talking about the value of Freeport Edge, Olmsted spoke of the enterprising work of company employees – from increased production at the Lone Star project in Safford to a competition for ideas in Bagdad modeled after the popular television show “Shark Tank” to a heightened level of engagement among all employees in the United States and South America.
“To hear the passion, the excitement, the enjoyment of those folks having been involved in those projects is really exciting, and I think that’s really going to allow us to grow the Freeport Edge behaviors even more,” he said. “Embed them in our training, embed them in our onboarding, embed them in our processes. That allows it to be a fabric of our organization and the way we work.”