Throughout his professional life, Matt Evans has found significance in a particular quote: “People make a business. Not chickens, not numbers, not anything else. People make a business.”
The words are those of the late Don Tyson, former CEO of Tyson Foods, America’s largest meat producer.
Evans, 44, works as the complex manager at Tyson’s Berry Street poultry facility in Springdale, Arkansas. As meat plant workers continue their labor to feed Americans while the rest of the country presses pause, Don Tyson’s quote rings truer than ever to him.
“We spend all our time really taking care of our team members,” Evans said in a recent interview with the Fieldston News. “We value our team members and that’s where we spend our time. We know that if we help them understand that we care about them … our company wins.”
Since much of the United States went into a coronavirus lockdown in mid-to-late March, threatening the economy along with it, essential workers have kept the wheels of society moving. These include health care workers, first responders, grocery workers, postal workers and many others. Meat plant workers have also fallen under this umbrella, with President Donald Trump invoking the Defense Production Act in late April to include meat processing plants in the nation’s critical infrastructure. After all, meat plant workers provide much of the country’s protein supply –– Tyson alone accounts for more than 20 percent of all the beef, pork and poultry Americans eat.
It’s been the job of people like Evans to keep that food supply coming. This hasn’t been an easy task by any means. Meat processing has become one of the industries hit hardest by the virus. Employees in these facilities often work in close proximity with one another, and several meat processing plants have had to close temporarily for deep cleaning due to high rates of infection among workers.
Tyson is testing all of its employees at Berry Street and other locations in northwest Arkansas for the coronavirus.
The company announced that of the 1,102 team members who work at Evans’ sites, 199 tested positive, but only one showed symptoms.
Tyson has heavily modified the workplace to combat the spread of the virus. At Berry Street, safety measures have been taken in nearly all areas of work. Temperatures are taken as employees enter the facility at the start of every shift, face masks and in some cases visors are required, and dividers have been installed in break rooms and on production lines.
“We’ve worked with safety around mechanical issues and things like that, and a lot of that is very visual,” Evans said. “So now, we’re having to tackle a virus that’s not. And we’ve spent an enormous amount of time as a company trying to be extremely proactive.”
“We changed our attendance program where workers weren’t penalized if they had to stay home … if they weren’t feeling well, Covid or not, we’re going to pay them.” Evans said. “When this all started, a lot of our team members said, ‘Hey, it’d be nice to have masks,’ and masks weren’t necessarily available. So a lot of our locations went out and hired small businesses in our areas to make cloth masks.”
Evans certainly never imagined he’d be thinking about facemasks or plastic dividers at Tyson when he joined the company as an intern, 21 years ago. He’s held many titles in his journey to being a complex manager. As an assistant plant manager, a corporate role as an operations specialist, a subject matter expert, and plant manager, Evans has been a valuable and versatile employee for Tyson.
His favorite part of his career? Seeing and helping those around him thrive. “It is a lot of fun coaching and teaching and watching our team members grow,” he said in his distinctive Arkansas lilt. “Both at work and in their personal life.”
Although many people in the country have opted to stay at home in these turbulent times, Evans is working as hard as ever. “I get here very early in the morning and stay late to make sure I’m available,” he said. “90 percent of my day for the last three months has been making sure that what we’re doing around safety is working.”
As for Evans, work-life shows no signs of changing any time soon. In fact, what seemed like an emergency scenario a few short weeks ago has become the new normal. “From where I’m sitting, I think that the safety measures we’ve put in place will be around for a while,” he said.
Images courtesy of Tyson Foods
