And so, for example, Cargill runs um employee engagement surveys every every year, 12 to 18 months, sometimes 24 months. And they're looking for three things. They're looking for people who are willing to say, stay, and support Cargill. And and they're all those questions are embedded in 25 30 40 uh different questions. and um you know and and all we've asked for our uh managers or leaders is to have an upward trend even if you have only 30 or 40% of your employees engaged next year we want it or next survey we want it to go to 50.
So as long as an upward trend and if if that's not happening that's a big red flag where you can't engage the hearts and minds of of employees and world class is 75% and so u and I was even 75 and I think when I moved from a business unit in Geneva uh when I left we were at 70 75%. And I always bother like, okay, so I've got 10 employees. I mean, mathematically, but there's that, you know, where's the other 25%.
Why aren't their hearts and minds engaged? You know, and that's because if you don't have the employees engagement, don't expect your customers be engaged. You don't expect to resolve problems in a in a lowcost reasonable manner. Um, from that standpoint and um so the employee engagement was also very big. I also was a big supporter of having highly engaged employees and if someone's heart was in it just do them a favor and help them find another role and maybe outside Cargill but it may be somewhere else that really looking for something different than what Cargo is offering or maybe they just didn't like the culture especially if we're putting a lot of emphasis on leadership and on um you know building teams on a communication on conflict resolution etc.
And um and and that was the expectation. And some people thought I was joking. Some people thought uh this is you guys are all nuts, you know. So they it's no problems. No problem. And but I'm not going to back off on what our requirements are. And so we would help them find another role somewhere else. Uh basically so so in that sense, I never actually technically fired anyone. Um because usually if there's a problem or issue in our performance, we'd sit down and go through what we need, what I'm looking for, and and very reasonable, make sure I provided the resources so they could actually complete that.
And then also what I don't want to see and fairly often, you know, you could turn it around. Um you know, they get their performance back on track, but sometimes they would they would show up going, "This is not for me. I I think you're nuts. I think Cargo goes nuts. I'm not willing to do that anymore. It's no problem. No problem. Thanks for telling me you get you're a good person. You know, let me help you uh you know, find a role that you're more suited in.
And it because it I think it's really a sad situation if you have people who are not happy, not engaged, um their heart's not in it for 10 years. I mean, you just wasted basically 10 years of their life, you know, where you going, the life is way too short to have people uh be in a situation where they um they're not being fulfilled by what they're doing and where they're spending a significant portion of their life's time.
