Teamwork: The Recipe for Success

One of the greatest lessons you learn when being in business a long time is that you are only as good as the individuals who make up your team. A company is the sum of its parts, its people.

Every single individual in a company, no matter their role, adds tremendous value, and collectively, they add up to who you are as a company. It’s been widely documented that teamwork is one of the best ways to bring all members of an organization together and make them truly care about each other and the work they are doing.

This article states it well: “Teams often arise when employees come together to accomplish a common goal.

Teamwork within the workplace not only benefits your workers but also significantly affects your business.”

At Stamar Packaging, we believe wholeheartedly in the idea of teamwork, of bringing employees together to accomplish goals, both within the realm of work they’re doing during business hours, and outside of that. And we believe that the result is a group of invaluable team members who are great at their jobs and care about what they do.

To this end, we recently participated in the ROC Race 5K, a game show-inspired obstacle race whose participants are referred to as ROC Stars (a fitting name for our employees). Taking place on July 12, 2014, this was our first ROC Race, and the company paid for and encouraged everyone who wanted to participate. One of the best parts: the ROC Race benefits The Challenged Athletes Foundation, a very worthwhile cause.

While the day of the event proved to be one of the rainiest of the summer—with the entire team getting rained on—it was still a fun and successful event. Some employees came to participate, others came to cheer them on. Despite the weather, some participants even went back and finished the race. In the end, it was still a great success; we had fun and bonded as a team. It was a great example of how teamwork can make a company even stronger.

We will continue to look out for and participate in more events of this nature (while keeping our fingers crossed for dry weather!), and most importantly, will continue to encourage solidarity as a group, ensuring our products and service are as great as the people who provide them.

Four Benefits of Corrugated Cardboard Boxes

While it seems obvious that the right protective packaging for shipping your products is critical, many companies don’t know what exactly the right choice is; therefore, inadvertently, many choose packaging that isn’t up to par, potentially harming their products and their business.

While there are certainly many packaging options, one of the best for protecting fragile and/or complex parts is corrugated cardboard packaging. The reasons for this are many; here are just some of the main benefits:

1) Highly Protective

Corrugated cardboard are constructed specifically for strength and durability, while still being lightweight.

Advanced computer designs turn paper into a highly sophisticated construction, which protects products within from moisture and other elements. The design process also allows for customization, so corrugated packages can be made to fit specific needs.

2) Sustainable

Since it all begins with wood, which is a renewable resource, corrugated cardboard can be recycled up to eight times. When you’re using a box of this kind, it is most likely recycled and recyclable.  Newspapers, boxes, and other materials are recycled to create corrugated cardboard, making it an extremely environmentally-friendly form of packaging.

3) Flexible

Corrugated boxes are simply one of the most flexible, versatile packaging products available. Almost limitless sizes, levels of protection, and shape combinations can be made. The choices are endless.

4) Cost-effective

These are also among the least expensive packaging/shipping options available. While the design process is sophisticated and high-tech, it’s also rather easy, which keeps the costs down. Using recycled, renewable materials also keeps them cost-effective. In this way, they’re good for the environment and the bottom line.

We have an extensive collection of these protective, affordable, reliable boxes. Visit our website to view the line.

The Value of Employee Morale

To be successful in manufacturing, there are two things a company must consistently do right: create quality products, and provide excellent customer service.

But of course, it goes much deeper than just this. After all, a company is only as good as the people who work for it, and it is those people who are responsible for making the quality products and providing the excellent customer service. These things don’t just happen.

It begins and ends with highly trained and experienced employees, but within that there’s the invaluable and highly critical aspect of employee morale. If employees are not happy, satisfied, respected, and valued, they are much less likely to work hard and provide the work that leads to successful business practices. And of course, the opposite is true.

This article points out that studies have shown that “engaged employees work harder, are often willing to take on extra responsibilities and are a positive influence on other employees,” with benefits that include “a higher rate of productivity and a lower staff turnover.” Disengaged employees put in the bare minimum and care less about their work and their company; they also tend to leave a company after a much shorter amount of time.

At Stamar Packaging, we realize this. Certainly because we know employee morale boosts our business, but also because we truly want our employees to be satisfied and happy, to feel valued—because they are. We are proud of our dedicated team of experts, and we care about them.

We promote this on a daily basis, but also with special events that are meant for bonding, relaxation, and fun. Each spring and fall we hold an employee-only barbeque, and have been for about ten years. Everyone is encouraged to bring their favorite dish, and we all vote on the top three dishes, with the winners receiving gift certificates. Everyone looks forward to the barbeques and has a wonderful time.

We are also taking part in the Chicago ROC Race on July 12, a 5K race that our employees joined and made sure everyone could get involved in. We’re all very excited!

We care about our employees and our customers, and we believe this is evident through the work we do. This is why we’re as successful as we are. 

Why Send Your Pallet to the Landfill When You Can Just Recycle?

On any given day of any given year, the USDA Forestry Service guesstimates that 1.9 billion wooden pallets circulate freely in the United States.  Despite recent advances in aluminum pallets and the like, wooden pallets still comprise a formidable number of the pallets used to conduct daily commerce in America, and will continue to do so as far as can be predicted. Given the gargantuan number of wooden pallets in daily operation in the U.S.A., it makes good business sense that those who use these pallets shouldn’t just drop them off at the landfill and let them go to waste once they’ve served their purpose and can’t be patched or repaired any further. It makes good, solid, cost-effective sense to recycle your pallets – not only are you aiding the environment and all that good stuff, but you end up saving your outfit a bundle of money to boot!

You don’t have to hug a tree to want to recycle a wooden pallet – it only makes good economic sense. Repairing and retrofitting pallets can prove to be cumulatively expensive after awhile. The cost of repairing a wooden pallet only runs to somewhere around two bucks, but if you’re running an extensive operation, those costs can pile up faster than you might expect. As far as pallet recycling, while the pay-off per pallet is fairly minimal (it depends which pallet recycler you choose to pursue business with), again, when you add up all the pallets recycled in the course of a year, it bulks up into quite a considerable sum.

Without the sustainability of wooden pallet recycling, a huge and unnecessary number of trees would have to be cut down per year just to maintain equilibrium. Thanks to advances in large-scale green technology (and the proven fact that it’s a profitable enterprise), all that may be changing for the better in times to come.

Stamar proudly uses and distributes recycled pallets as part of its inventory. Come see what we can offer you today in our vast inventory of all things pallet and pallet-unitizing!

Falling Is for Leaves on Trees, Not Workers on the Job

Every workplace, no matter if it’s a gritty urban warehouse or a nest of cubicles in the suburbs, has its perils in terms of falling. You don’t have to be weighed down with a 50 lb. bag of cement or window-washing a skyscraper at 35 stories to suffer a serious work-related injury, or worse. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in 2009 alone, over 212,000 workers were seriously injured by falls, slips, or trips while at their place of work. Sadly, the same report cited a figure of 605 workers who died as a result of injuries sustained by falling during the same time period. That’s a figure that we should all let sink in if we’re ever going to help bring about a change in that.

Stamar has long made it a priority to provide for workers’ safety in every possible way. Our track record more than proves it: in another blog from earlier this year, we talked about the wildly successful blood donation campaign we initiated at our company on behalf of local hospitals. But it’s the products we offer that speak more to the issue: what we provide and distribute to other companies is a way for these companies to promote worker safety – including slips and falls. When it comes to fall prevention, Stamar provides items ranging from wet floor janitorial signs, wet mops, and a specialized oil dry product that absorbs almost any form of spill – including oil, grease, acids, water, and admixtures of soluble oils and water. We’re serious about safety. It’s something we will always practice strongly.

Plastic or Wooden Pallets? The Choice Is Pretty Straightforward

While there is one distinct advantage wooden pallets have over plastic ones – they are biodegradable – there is a whole host of reasons why plastic plastics are, in the long run, preferable to wood when conducting a successful shipping and handling business. One of the chief reasons is durability: to put it simply, plastic pallets can go through a lot more punishment than can wooden ones. Not only is plastic resilient against decomposition, but it’s generally more effective at handling the bumps, bangs, dings, and assorted lacerations that are par for the course in materials handling. Whether you’re running a warehouse operation that provides for a single city, or whether you’re running a long-distance freight truck company that delivers goods to distant States, your best bet for your dollar is going to be in plastic. Generally speaking, plastic pallets have been found to be almost 50 times more durable than their wooden counterparts.

Furthermore, the advantage of a wooden pallet being recyclable gets overwritten by the fact that a plastic pallet can just as easily be recycled. Numerous plastic recycling centers exist in most regions of the United States and southern Canada. These facilities aren’t the type to simply recycle plastic bottles of pop or Poland Spring. They’re fully capable of recycling larger-scale plastic pallets into other, vitally needed products. Not only that, but any company that trades in its plastic waste to one of these recycling centers can make a brisk side-business in terms of cost-savings. And generally speaking, plastic pays higher premiums than does wood or paper.

At Stamar, we not only carry plastic pallets for any variety of application or weight-load, we also are deeply engaged with green recycling. Not only is it cost-effective for our own business, but it’s all part of our strategy to leave less of an industrial footprint from the products we use and supply. To find out more about Stamar’s plastic pallet capabilities, contact us today.

Air Pollution in the Great Indoors

Unless you’re a construction worker or a Park Ranger, chances are that when you work, you work inside either a building or a vehicle. Whether you work in a large commercial office-park or in a century-old (though hopefully updated) assembly plant, you are probably familiar to some extent with the problems and perils presented by indoor air pollution. Air that accumulates and stagnates over the course of a time in one given spot can not only lose some of its breathability, but there’s every chance that hidden pollutants – even trace amounts of them – lurk in various corners of any given workspace or jobsite.

Obvious culprits like oil, gas, kerosene, and coal are only the tip of the iceberg. Think about all the various cleaning products and maintenance procedures that go into upkeep of a facility: all the bathroom cleaners, the spray bottles, the humidifiers, the air conditioners and heaters, and even the dust that gets disturbed by the scuffle of feet or vacuum cleaners – all of it accumulates over time and can generate a lot of problems. In some extreme cases, one might even begin to believe that ongoing maintenance leads to even bigger problems than the short-term solutions it offers, even if a single cleaning by itself is harmless enough. Asthma, pneumonia, and the unseemly phenomenon of humidifier fever can all be contracted through prolonged exposure.

Rip-proof trashcan liners can help
combat contaminant pollution at work.

There are ways, of course, of keeping this all in check. Not only should a building be well-ventilated and consistently updated to conform to current building codes, but managers and workers can take additional steps to prevent indoor air pollution from getting to them. Not only are face-masks a potential source of protecting against the “hazards of the great indoors,” but it’s sometimes good (especially if you work in a factory) to have several large bags of oil dry on hand. Not only that, but certain types of trashcan liners are especially puncture and rip-proof. That way, you’re sure not to get any unnecessary contaminants spoiling your work environment.

Stamar provides many different products in its line-up that let you fight back against air contamination in the interior of a building. Give us a call today; we’re sure to be able to help out.