WARE's Culture

It’s everything and everyone together. It starts with acting on our values and beliefs, but culture is much more. It’s also the decisions we make about growth and the decisions we make about company benefits. It’s who we hire, how we treat one another, and how we respond to challenges. It’s our views on generosity, our processes in the shop, and our safety program. All these things and more impact our culture. We firmly believe our culture is a very significant factor in our longevity and success, so we pay very close attention to it.

Service

Service is one of the great legacies of our company. To us, a servant is someone who chooses to unselfishly meet the needs of others. Our business is built on this definition of service. Each day we want to serve our customers and our employees with the very best we have to offer. This philosophy has stood the test of time and has never let us down. In our marketplace time is critical so we must serve our customers with urgency.  

Faith

Our faith informs our decisions and forms the basis of our values.  It’s a wonderful legacy that has been woven into the fabric of our company for generations. 

Growth

We really enjoy growing our business and we love to compete. Whether it’s winning a new customer, completing a project ahead of schedule, or watching an employee develop a new skill. We take swings and we welcome challenges. Challenges give us a chance to compete and a chance to win. It’s clear to us the business grows when its people grow, so we invest heavily to develop each person’s unique potential. 

Reputation

We care very intensely about how our company is perceived. Over time we have built and maintained our reputation by doing what we said we would do, treating people with dignity, and making things right if we missed the mark. Our reputation is critical and we make its integrity a high priority because a good reputation translates into trust. 

Relationships

Because we value people so highly, we value healthy relationships. These relationships are at the heart of our company and are built on trust and respect, both given and received. Because people are our highest priority, we fully embrace the level of commitment needed to build and sustain great relationships. From the start, WARE has always been about people. We think about it like this; “If you don’t have great relationships with great people…what do you really have?”. 

Legacy

We have tremendous respect and appreciation for the work of our Founders. They built this company with vision, ingenuity, and great people. They left behind a strong foundation for us to build the future upon. We don’t think of legacy as a collection of memories stored away in an album. Legacy lives in the present because just like our founders, we want to leave a positive and lasting “mark” on our people and on the marketplace. What we do today determines the legacy we will leave behind.  

Humility

Humility is a healthy realization of our role in this world. Our role is to keep our hands to the plow and work with the soil, seed, and sun provided for us. We have been blessed with many opportunities that are not of our hand. Humility allows us to put others first and enables our culture of service. We don’t view humility as weakness, as some people do. We see humility as a sign of confidence and security. 

Ownership

Our business has a tremendous need for people who initiate work and solve problems without someone looking over their shoulder. We also have a tremendous need for people who accept personal responsibility for their behavior and actions. The combination of initiative and personal responsibility has a tremendous impact on our culture. For example, our culture says we don’t give up and surrender to our circumstances because things get tough, and we don’t shrug off our responsibility when we owe someone an apology. As “owners” we lean into these situations, without complaining, and get things done.

Generosity

We choose to be generous because we believe there is enough to go around. A great example of this is the regular free sharing of ideas, time, resources, and knowledge between employees. Because of the generous nature of our employees, WARE has a long history of mentoring and apprenticeship. We believe generosity plays an important role in building a strong team that serves each other and our customers. 

DAILY SEVEN

The mantras we Live, stand, and work by.

1. Safety first and always – Your safety, and the safety of our customers, is our highest priority.
2. Communicate – We need you to be an active and effective communicator to make things work.
3. Be Responsive – Our motor has to match our customer’s demands. Don’t make people wait.
4. Own it – be a person who takes responsibility and gets things done.  
5. Be helpful – we all get better when we help each other out.
6. Figure it out – take the initiative to fix it and show the grit to stay with it.
7. Do it right the first time – deliver a quality product the first time around, when it’s expected.