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Loyalty led to a windfall for the employees of Fibrebond. The CEO of the Louisiana-based company Graham Walker has given a total of $420 million (Rs 2,154 crore) in bonuses to 500 employees. The employees could receive the extraordinarily high amount as bonus after Walker sold the company to Eaton, a power-management firm, for $1.7 billion.
By setting a condition that the buyer of his company should extend 15 per cent of the sale proceeds to his employees, Graham Walker turned real-life Santa Claus, making his employees millionaires.
Walker wanted to reward the employees for their loyalty and dedication to the company and management during its worst crisis period. The recent shift to artificial intelligence across systems helped Fibrebond strengthen its sale.
Fibrebond was founded by Walker’s father, Claud Walker, in 1982 with just a dozen employees in Minden, Louisiana. Initially, the company built structures for telephones, electrical equipment and train tracks. In 1990s, the business shifted to constructing concrete enclosures for cellphone towers witnessing the cellular boom and it fetched good profits.
In 1998, the company faced a crisis but Claud continued to pay employees their salaries. Eventually, the employees developed loyalty towards Walkers for pushing ahead even during the tough time, according to a report in Wall Street Journal. Just two years later, Fibrebond witnessed a rise in demand but the dot-com bubble burst hit the company. The customer base dwindled to just three and the workforce was slashed from 900 to 320. The loss streak prompted Graham and his brother to take over the reins of the company. They made a foray into different trades but could not witness profits.
However, the staff remained loyal to the Walkers even when they froze their salaries. The loyalty stemmed from Walkers’ commitment to provide for the employees by setting up a fund for them, to enable them pay their bills.
In 2015, Graham became the CEO and he then recruited some of the workers laid off earlier. Instead of giving individual bonuses, Fibrebond started a culture of giving group bonuses when some safety targets were met. Then Fibrebond invested $150 million in building infrastructure for data centres, along with enclosures for power equipment.
During the lockdown in 2020, the company’s decision to invest in data centres paid off. With data becoming a key component for cloud computing and emergence of AI as the only solution for several technical issues, Fibrebond sales skyrocketed. Coupled with investment in terminals exporting LNG, Fibrebonds’s sales surged to 400 per cent in the last five years, catching the attention of bigger companies like Eaton.
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