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Published May 2006

Jelly Belly Candy Company: Satisfying a Development Sweet Tooth

 

  Cari McLean

The company currently has two manufacturing facilities, one in Fairfield, Calif., and one in the Chicago metropolitan area, where more than 50 different flavors of Jelly Belly jelly beans and 100 other candies including chocolates, gummies, sour candies and confections are produced and distributed nationwide and in 25 international markets. With its sights set on international expansion, Jelly Belly recently centralized its workforce management processes at the Fairfield headquarters in order to streamline HR processes—specifically the company's employee appraisal system.

Up until about six years ago, Jelly Belly's two manufacturing facilities operated independently, and once it was decided that the company's processes would be centralized, Jeff Brown, vice president of human resources, undertook the overwhelming task of formalizing a new employee handbook. "After we started to merge departments into our corporate headquarters in California, I had to write an employee handbook that integrated and merged two companies as one. The handbook in Chicago was different from the handbook in California, and California's handbook had not been updated since 1981," Brown explained. "It was quite a daunting task to integrate both handbooks to form a workable document companywide that could formalize our company policies and also keep in line with our friendly company culture."

After the company's departments were successfully combined, Brown and his HR team decided to unify Jelly Belly's HR policies and services further. "At this point a few years ago, the project became, 'Let's start formalizing and making a lot of polices that we have, a lot of services that we offer as an HR team consistent. One of those was workplace performance—monitoring and tracking—and that is something that we finally accomplished in 2005."

According to Brown, Jelly Belly's HR department strives to grow and develop its workforce, provide the best services for its employees and continue to provide consistent and equitable policies across the board. In order to give its workforce across the United States the best services, Jelly Belly overhauled and automated its employee-management system to help employees better understand what's expected of them so that clear and measurable objectives could be set. "With our revamped workplace performance system, employees now receive their annual review every year, during the end of May and beginning of June. And the way the process is set up now, we use a universal format for all employee levels—from the janitor to the vice president—with the exception of core competencies, of course," Brown said. "Also organizing and automating the appraisal process results in appraisals that are more accurate and fair. This is important because an employee appraisal is a legal document."

Brown said the EPM system also rates employees on a variety of performance criteria, enabling the company to tie compensation to performance. "Each manager within a department—whether in manufacturing, sales, IT or accounting—is given a budget based on a percentage of the salaries for the folks in their department, and based on performance, we are able to evaluate what their ratings are against the proposed salary adjustments," Brown said.