<p>Smokey Denmark’s Smoked Meats Company is a small business in Austin, Texas producing premium quality sausage. In this episode of All Things Work, host Tony Lee speaks with Smokey Denmark’s owner, Melissa Pace, about her decision to hire nine Burmese immigrants with limited English language skills and provide a workplace education program to help them develop their English proficiency.<br /><br />Learn more about Smokey Denmark's <a href="https://www.smokeydenmark.com/">on their website</a>.<br /><br />Subscribe to All Things Work on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out <a href="https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/Pages/Podcasts.aspx">SHRM.org/podcasts</a> to listen to all of our episodes and also hear more podcasts from SHRM. And, be sure to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice.<br /><br />Keep up with SHRM by visiting the <a href="https://www.shrm.org/">website</a> and follow us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/societyforhumanresourcemanagement">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/company/shrm/">LinkedIn</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/SHRM">Twitter</a> and <a href="https://www.instagram.com/shrmofficial/?hl=en">Instagram</a>.<br /><br />Music courtesy of <a href="https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free-music/track/hip-jazz">bensound</a>.</p>
Smokey Denmark’s Smoked Meats Company is a small business in Austin, Texas producing premium quality sausage. In this episode of All Things Work, host Tony Lee speaks with Smokey Denmark’s owner, Melissa Pace, about her decision to hire nine Burmese immigrants with limited English language skills and provide a workplace education program to help them develop their English proficiency.
Learn more about Smokey Denmark's on their website.
Subscribe to All Things Work on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out SHRM.org/podcasts to listen to all of our episodes and also hear more podcasts from SHRM. And, be sure to rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or your podcatcher of choice.
Keep up with SHRM by visiting the website and follow us on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram.
Music courtesy of bensound.
Tony Lee:
Welcome to the All Things Work podcast from the society for human resource management. I'm your host, Tony Lee, head of editorial operations here at SHRM, and thank you for joining us. All Things Work is an audio adventure where we talk with thought leaders and tastemakers to bring you an insider's perspective on all things work. So I'm very excited today to bring you today's episode, which features a story that's quite literally all over the map from Myanmar in Thailand to Austin, Texas. It's also unexpectedly a story about sausage.
But let's back up and let you know that today, we'll be talking about US employers who offer workplace English language training programs to help employees who don't speak English. According to the National Immigration Forum, one in 10 working-age adults in the US has limited English language proficiency, which often is a handicap that can severely constrain their employment opportunities.
Many employers are beginning to recognize the value in offering English language education to immigrant populations as a method to help fill open positions and access a previously untapped labor market. Joining me to share the story of how her company began providing an English language program to employees is Melissa Pace. Melissa and her husband, Jonathan, co-own and operate Smokey Denmark's Smoke Meats Company, a premium sausage maker based in Austin, Texas, that's been in the business of turning out smoke sausage since 1964. They acquired the company in 1999 with the vision of appearing on every plate in Texas and now have 26 employees.
In 2017, Melissa and Jonathan hired nine Burmese refugees who had previously been living in the forest of Thailand after being driven out of their homeland of Myanmar but were then able to come to the US to build a new life. The wrinkle is that these workers had limited English language abilities. So Melissa and the leadership of Smokey Denmark's made the decision to invest in this group of hires to improve their English skills. Melissa, it's so exciting to have you here. Welcome to All Things Work.
Melissa Pace:
Thank you, Tony. It's great to be here.
Tony Lee:
Well, thanks. So I have to say, first of all, I'm a native Texan, and I'm doing everything I can to keep my accent under wraps, but it sneaks out. So why don't you start by just telling us about Smokey Denmark? Tell us about the company, your employees, your products.
Melissa Pace:
There really was a Smokey Denmark. His name was Albert C Denmark. His nickname was Smokey, and he started the company in 1964 with his wife, Eloise, by his side. It was a very small company, and it grew big enough to where they built a second location, a bigger meat plant that could meet the current modern USDA standards back in 1969. And he operated that company at that location until 1972 when my dad and uncle bought the company from Mr. Denmark because he needed to retire for health reasons. In 1999, Jonathan was down at Smokey Denmark. Do you remember the Y2K bug?
Tony Lee:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Melissa Pace:
Our accounting software at the time was not going to be Y2K compliant. And so Jonathan was down here migrating our accounting software. He came from a food service background. His dad owned restaurants in Houston. And so food was kind of in his blood. He really enjoyed... He came from the high-tech industry, but when he was down here migrating the software, he really fell in love with the company. Jonathan and I are both accountants. So we didn't work at Smokey Denmark. I did the books, but we never really worked down here.
And he came to me one day, and he wanted to buy my uncle's half of the company. My uncle wanted to retire. And I said, "Oh my goodness, Jonathan, we don't know anything about making sausage." But it has been the hugest blessing to us to own the company. We love working together. We raised our family in the business, and we still continue to work here full time, and we just love it. Love the hospitality of it. And people make memories around food. We all do. We eat at restaurants. Well, I mean before COVID. But we eat with family at weddings, graduations, and we love to be a part of that. And that's what gets us out of bed every morning.
Tony Lee:
Wow. That's wonderful. What a great legacy you guys are creating. So let's talk a little bit about the nine employees from Myanmar who joined Smokey Denmark's who did not have great English language skills. Can you talk about why you hired them and what your plan was, knowing that they didn't speak much English?
Melissa Pace:
It happened just by chance. I mean, I would say it was a blessing. Our very first team member from Myanmar she came in with her husband and asked for a job application. And she had meat processing experience. She had worked in a chicken processing plant kind of in rural Texas, I think, outside of Seguin. And we don't get that many team members applying for jobs that have meat processing experience. It's not a common skill, and we weren't even hiring at the time, but because somebody had that experience, we thought, "Well, we want to hire her."
And so she started working, I think, it was in August of 2017. Her husband, who also filled out an application, he didn't have any meat processing experience, and we really didn't need to use him. But we did bring him in because we realized the other team member, we didn't want her to be on an island. I think when you don't speak English and you can't communicate with your coworkers, you feel very isolated. I mean, you could teach her the job, but she had no camaraderie, no connection by herself.
So we hired her husband, who spoke a little bit of English, and that was very helpful, and we could try to communicate. And then, just as we grew and we had turnover, they would suggest people that they knew that were also from the same people group. And we went ahead and hired them as well. And it ended up to where 32% of our workforce were people from Myanmar. And some of the groups spoke Karenni. Some spoke Karen. Their common language was Burmese, and some of them could speak a little bit of English.
And they worked so hard. They're wonderful people. But we absolutely could not communicate with them even to say good morning. I thought I could maybe learn a little bit of Burmese. I don't know if you've ever looked at the language, but it's a tonal language. It's a lot like Chinese. It's very hard. And I thought there's got to be a better way because we wanted to communicate with them. So then, just through a search on the computer, I was able to find language connection, which we researched a little bit more and were able to set up a English class on our premises that we had every week for them.
Tony Lee:
So was this a nonprofit group, or did you have to invest to have someone come out?
Melissa Pace:
We considered it an investment. It is. It's kind of pricey. But what we were hoping, this people group, they were very hard workers. They were very responsible, very teachable, but they were limited. They would never be able to be in a leadership position because you just have to be able to speak some English and also be able to read and write some English. So we thought we wanted them to not always be limited for them to be able to rise up into leadership positions.
Another aspect that Jonathan and I feel very strongly about. I mean, we actually call this our work family. You're at work with people eight to 10 hours a day, and you want to like them and get along with them. We consider them our work family, this people group. If they are not able to speak English, not only does it hurt them kind of at work, but it hurts them in their everyday lives.
You want to help them to get their foot up on the first run of the ladder and be able to communicate with the person at the grocery store or at the post office, or at the doctor's office. So we looked at as helping them be able to put down strong roots here in this community also.
Tony Lee:
So the process gets going, everyone is getting trained. You're adding more employees who are benefiting from this. How did the rest of your workforce respond? What did they think of this?
Melissa Pace:
We loved it. It was so wonderful. We were actually able to start saying good morning, and they would be saying good morning back. I mean, it didn't just stop at good morning. It gave them confidence. And I don't know if you know a second language, I mean, I can speak Spanish, but I'm always hesitant to do so. I'm embarrassed with my accent or that I'm going to conjugate a verb incorrectly or something. So they didn't have the confidence.
And we actually had one team member who had never really spoken, ever. Always smiled. He speaks in his native language to his coworkers, but he had never spoken English. And at the class, he was able to gain more confidence to where he was able to, at least, say hello or good morning or thank you. And he's very shy, but it seemed like it helped him come out of his shell and feel like a more part of the group. And the teacher, our instructor, was fabulous. And she would bring them through the plant, and they would point out things that they worked on, and she would teach them the English version.
So the communication with the other people on their team improved because they learned the words for conveyor belt or different things like that. And she made it more fun also to where they learned body parts. So eyes, elbow, those kind of things. So then they also had to come in to the front office and they had to use those words in a short conversation or writing us a little note, thanking us for something. It's been wonderful. It's really been a wonderful process.
Tony Lee:
That's great. In talking to some other employers that have done things like this, what we often hear is it made a big difference in the workplace, but it made a big difference outside of the workplace. That these folks really became citizens of the community and learned a skill that would've really held them back otherwise. Right.
Melissa Pace:
I do believe that. I also see them more active, but I see them taking time off on afternoons sometimes, well, this is before COVID also, but to go meet with their child's teacher. When before they didn't... I mean, the child, I guess, would be the go-between would be the translator, but I didn't see them taking off the time to go meet with the teacher like I do now. So I feel like they have just the more confidence of fitting into the community.
Tony Lee:
So the lessons that you've learned in working with these employees, I mean, I guess, are they lessons that are applicable to the rest of your work team, or are they lessons that you now know when you go to hire in the future? I mean, would you see yourself hiring folks from another culture where language issue is an issue?
Melissa Pace:
Oh, definitely. So 40% of our workforce, I believe English is their second language. Spanish is the other. And luckily, a lot of us kind of know Spanish. I would definitely be open to hiring another people group. It is more than the language. You have to learn their culture, respect their culture. When you introduce the people from Myanmar coming from forest, they come not with the idea of a boss or an employee relationship. That's all new to them as well. So there's been some challenges, but it's something that we really want to try to learn and also teach them to help them to survive and have a great quality of life here.
Tony Lee:
Mm-hmm. I assume some of your employees have children. You mentioned that they go and talk to their teachers. How does that work in terms of helping with their English skills? Are you finding that they're learning as much from their kids as they are from your program?
Melissa Pace:
You would think that they would if they had kids teaching them all these years because one of their children actually worked for us in the summertime between grades, and she was very... very Americanized. And you would think that they would learn a lot from their kids. I don't know why. I'm not sure what the issue is there. I'm not sure, but I feel like they didn't have the confidence by maybe having to practice [inaudible 00:13:25] people in front of people that were outside of their family. It really helped them to make progress.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. No, that makes sense. Well, I mean, I think about myself, and you mentioned your Spanish skills. Spanglish is probably the best definition of mine. I wonder if there's a Spanglish equivalent for Burmese.
Melissa Pace:
I know. I know. I know. And what was interesting is to know that they were speaking Karenni, Karen, and Burmese. And then, one of the girls could speak Spanish, but she couldn't speak English. I mean, it was amazing how we were all... When people want to communicate, they figure out a way. It might be difficult, but there is... People are determined.
Tony Lee:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, this is just great. We're almost out of time, but I wanted to ask one other question, which is, if you were advising another small business owner who perhaps is facing talent shortages and maybe sees applicants who don't have good English language skills. What advice would you give them?
Melissa Pace:
If at all possible, if the company could afford to have a live teacher in a classroom setting to offer that, you're making an investment in your team that will outlast even just that one team member because you're showing that you care and it has made all the difference. I talked about getting your foot up on that first rung of the ladder. It's so important to invest in the team because it carries forward to the next generation and to the entire team to show that you're caring about a certain group of people to help them be better.
If you're a small business owner, find the people in your community. To be honest. Jonathan and I didn't know that there was a pretty good size Burmese population in Austin. I mean, Austin's a pretty big place. But, find the people that are in your community that are underrepresented. But find those people in your community, search them out and give them a chance because they might be your best... hard workers and willing to learn. But making the extra investment in the small classroom setting was really wonderful.
Tony Lee:
Yeah. Well, that makes perfect sense, Melissa. What's your company's website? So in case people are interested in learning more, where should they go?
Melissa Pace:
Smokeydenmark.com.
Tony Lee:
Good. That's nice and easy. Well, Melissa, thank you so much for joining me to talk about Smokey Denmark's English language training program. It was really interesting. I appreciate it a great deal. Before we get out of here, I just want to encourage everyone to subscribe to this podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Google Play, wherever you listen to podcasts.
And while you're at it, be sure to give us a five-star rating and leave a review. Also, be sure to check out SHRM on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and you can find all of our episodes and other podcasts from SHRM on our website at shrm.org/podcasts. Thanks for listening. And we'll catch you next time on All Things Work.