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Company: EMKAY, Itasca, IL
Company Description: Emkay is a provider of vehicle financing and management solutions to businesses throughout North America. Founded in 1946 and the 2nd oldest fleet management company in the nation, our focus is on operational excellence. As the industries only privately held, employee-owned company, our unique ownership enables a special personal pride in servicing our customers.
Nomination Category: Customer Service & Call Center Awards Team Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Customer Service Training Team of the Year

Nomination Title: EMKAY's PASSPORT To A New You

Tell the story about what this nominated team achieved since the beginning of July 2012 (up to 525 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

EMKAY believes without great employees, greatness wouldn’t be achievable. As a recipient of awards such as Top 100 Workplaces in Chicago, 101 Best Places to Work in Illinois, and 101 Best and Brightest Companies, EMKAY has been recognized as a leader. As such, we have placed our employees’ education and training as a high corporate priority. One of the most critical items we faced in continuing our training initiatives was employee engagement and interaction. EMKAY took a unique approach and truly empowered employees to take ownership of their education while expanding their engagement within the company. We developed a new training platform based off employees’ personal interests and drive, EMKAY’s PASSPORT To A New You.

PASSPORT is more than just a company-wide training initiative; it’s an employee education and empowerment program.

THE PLAN: Our program began by creating entirely new Media Center learning spaces within our headquarters campus. By providing employees with creative and modern spaces to use for training, learning and growth, we created a more effective path to success.

Headquarters now houses 8 specific themed areas within our Media Center with a specific theme around an educational medium:

• Multi-media Library
• Inter-active and Video Media Room
• Discussion and Debate Media Room
• Online Media Training Center
• 4 Visual Media Centers
o Finance
o Current Events
o World Events
o Automotive

THE PROCESS: By enabling employees to shift their mind-set on learning and education within our collaborative places, interaction and discussion became a key way for increasing brainpower.

One example, Discussion and Debate Media Room, was built around employees having theme-based discussions on world events led by an employee moderator. This not only brings a level of new education to the team, but also, a forum to discuss how this can affect them personally/professionally or how these events can change or add value to our work processes.

Video is an innovative way to communicate in today’s business environment. So, in our Inter-active and Video Media Room, EMKAY has built a filming and editing studio. The goal is two-fold. First, it’s designed to act as our ‘news-studio’ whereas our customer trainers can host their video webinars on our various products and tools. The second is to create a place where all expert application users can use the equipment to make short but impactful in-house videos to train team members on internal systems, products, or processes.

THE DRIVE AND RESULTS: The final step toward pulling it all together and providing an incentive with impact, was to create a drive for employees to embrace these new concepts. The team came up with the PASSPORT theme and tagline PASSPORT: “Grow Yourself One Stamp At A Time With EMKAY.” Then created a companywide tracking program where employees receive stamps on their own “EMKAY PASSPORTs” for each task they complete. Each stamp gets them closer to their goals and prizes, the ultimate prize being a cruise.

By empowering employees to attain the education on their own terms we have found that they strive to attain their own goals, which ultimately align with EMKAY’s goals of producing more educated employees to service our internal and external customers.

Provide a brief (up to 125 words) biography about the leader(s) of the nominated team:

Chris Tepas currently serves as Chief Marketing Officer and Executive Vice President for EMKAY Inc. Tepas joined EMKAY in 1999 after completing his degree from Arizona State University and professional design training from the Art Institute of California – San Francisco. Tepas was promoted to Vice President of Sales in 2003, executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing in 2006, Executive Vice President of Client Services and Marketing in 2009.