Cape P&G leaders outline response to pandemic, support of community

With 1,200 employees and an additional 500 contractors and vendors coming in and out Procter & Gamble's (P&G) Cape Girardeau plant on a weekly basis, leadership quickly devised a plan for worker safety and production continuity when the coronavirus pandemic hit in March.

The global health crisis resulted in empty store shelves and consumer purchase limits on toilet paper and paper towels, the exact items made at the Cape Girardeau plant.

P&G products represent a majority of items on USA Today's list of supplies that have been selling out during the pandemic -- leaving the company with the challenge of how to respond to the demand.

The official COVID response statement from the corporate offices outlines the company's priorities: Protect health and wellbeing of P&G workers; serve customers with their brands; and support communities and relief agencies on the frontlines of the pandemic. The Cape Girardeau plant appears to be addressing all three components.

"All of this happened very quickly," Tara McMullin, human resources manager for Family Care at the Cape Girardeau plant, said. "We're a large plant and made sure we were doing the right thing by our employees and putting protocols in place to keep them safe because we needed them coming into work in order to keep production moving in the right direction."

P&G employee Melodie Burnett poses inside the Cape Girardeau County plant in an undated photo.Submitted

With 20 years of experience working for P&G, McMullin swiftly assembled leaders from all aspects of the business to put a plan in place.

Within a week, they had temperature checks, acquired masks for all employees and contractors and secured extra masks for employees to be safe in the community "in order to keep their families safe," McMullin said.

The plan consisted of workers changing their start and end time, "but everybody was so thankful that we were going above and beyond to keep people safe, and the ability to continue working," she said.

Brent Herdina, utilities area leader and a 29-year P&G veteran, said the changes put in place made him put things in perspective, including "how to treat and evaluate your own life day-to-day."

Fred Sparks, tissue line leader with 21-years at P&G, added that workers felt protected.

P&G employee Derrick Dean poses inside the Cape Girardeau County plant in an undated photo.Submitted

"P&G went over and above to make sure not only are we protected, but our families are protected," he said. "And even while we're doing our jobs, they have protocols in place for us to make sure that we stay safe, even though we come and go and interact with other people."

Remarkably, they have not had to shut down any lines or departments because of employees being in quarantine.

Jack Geissinger, Family Care plant manager, said they might lose a few hours cleaning the line if they had a person under quarantine, but the employees don't want to shut down.

"They know how important getting these products out to the community is," he said. "There's a point of pride around making supplies people need. They step up every day and demonstrate that."

Geissinger has been with Procter & Gamble for 37 years with the last six in Cape Girardeau.

A P & G employee gets their temperature checked at a location in Pennsylvania.Submitted

"We get used to that attitude here in Cape," Geissinger said, "but having been in other plants that's a whole different level in my mind what we see in Cape Girardeau versus other places."

Kristina Christian, towel line leader, has been with P&G for 22 years and is thankful "because we are able to come to work and able to continue to support our families through the pandemic by being able to come to work every day and to have a company that is taking care of you, giving you the necessary supplies to be safe at work and home."

Being one of the larger volume-producing sites, operating on 1,300 acres with over 3 million-square-feet of building under roof, comes with responsibility to get product on the shelves and in homes.

In order to meet climbing consumer demand, the Cape Family Care plant, one of six Family Care plants in the U.S. making Charmin, had to run at full capacity 24-hours a day and even during holidays. The division also makes Bounty Paper Towels. Additionally, the Cape Girardeau P&G plant is home to a Baby Care plant that makes diapers.

"We're doing what we can; we run all we can," Geissinger said. "At Christmas, employees volunteered to come to work "because they know how important it is, which is a big deal. That speaks to how committed they are to delivering business for customers and consumers."

Geissinger said business was "very healthy before the pandemic hit," but adds they realize how great the need is, adding, "No matter how much you make, it's going to be to be sold as quickly as folks can get it."

According to the Cincinnati Business Courier, strong demand for cleaning and hygiene products driven by the coronavirus pandemic propelled the Cincinnati-based consumer goods giant to its largest single quarter sales increase in 15 years.

"We don't anticipate any slowdown," Geissinger said. "We try to look a quarter at a time; this quarter we're going to be full. It took off and really hasn't stopped."

He credits the employees and leadership for stepping up with fewer resources, juggling new schedules and being short-handed at times due to workers in quarantine -- but they continue to meet demand.

"We've had a good year plus," Geissinger said. "For about a year and a half, we've been doing extremely well.

"The thing that's interesting with this plant is that we have to really work to work as a unit. When we win, we all win. We want our sister sites to be successful. It's about having Bounty and Charmin where it needs to be at the right time and right place, whether we make it, or someone else makes it," he said.

Geissinger noticed the work ethic and culture of the Cape Girardeau location during a visit eight years ago.

"I was working in the Kansas City plant when I had a chance to visit the Cape plant," he said. "When you've been to as many sites as I have -- this is my eighth location -- you know a good plant when you see one, they have a certain feel to it. So, I requested to come."

Among his initial observations was the desire of the employees to do a good job.

"They want to be the best," Geissinger said. "That really fuels our success here in Cape. We're very competitive with our products, how quickly we can make it. We're very agile, very adaptive. And that's our reputation within the Family Care sector."

The Cape plant, which celebrated 50 years as a member of the Cape Girardeau community in August 2020, continues to have success during the pandemic amid challenges, but overall, they have found ways to persevere.

"We've had employees that have lost family members. We have an employee that lost both her mother and father on the same day to COVID. And so to be able to have resources and reach out to that employee and support them on their worst of their life ... they come back and are so thankful and so appreciative and it's just a testament to our culture and our willingness to take care of one another and help each other," McMullin said.

"We can't produce if we can't keep our folks safe. There were some very proactive moves made by our central resources to procure masks and sanitizer," Geissinger said.

At the same time, ingenuity emerged inside the plant.

At a corporate level, plans were made to make masks at some plants. Cape Girardeau's Baby Care plant was identified since its technology is similar to mask making.

"We had to redo some things, get some exceptions from the government, but within about three months, had them up and making masks that we could supply to all of our employees and also allow our employees to bring some home and be donated to the community specifically here in Cape," Geissinger said.

Geissinger said that process of retrofitting equipment to U.S. standards would ordinarily take at least a year to put in place and they had it up and running within a few months.

"It was pretty awesome to see," he added.

At the same time, there are other plants that mix ingredients and chemicals differently than Cape Girardeau, so they started making hand sanitizer. The Cape plant received drums of hand sanitizer from other plants, distributing it to employees, and gave three 55-gallon drums of sanitizer away to the community through the United Way.

Also helping to keep their employees healthy are the two nurses on staff at the plant.

"The nurses are here Monday through Friday, and they do an outstanding job of taking care of our employees." McMullin said. "Our nurses just do a fabulous job of making sure that the employee or their family member is getting the right treatment and knows where do we go."

"It is a massive job," Geissinger said, referring to keeping track of all the data of employees not feeling well, in quarantine and isolation.

McMullin added, "We've had lots of people quarantined and in and out of illness, either themselves or a family member, and it is amazing to watch Cape employees rally around [and say], 'Okay we're missing this person and this person so we're going to shuffle a couple of these people over there.'

"It's really wonderful to see people step up and new leaders come forward to continue production because at the end of the day, we all care for each other. We're a big family and we will step in and take care of whatever needs to be done," she said.

In order to accelerate the testing process for employees, P&G placed testing facilities in a technical center at Cincinnati headquarters. Once that was in place, Cape nurses could swab an employee from their car in the parking lot, put the sample in a container, ship it overnight to Cincinnati, and get test results back within 24 hours. Geissinger called this a "huge advantage" in keeping employees healthy and not in quarantine unnecessarily.

In a number of cases, other plant locations needed help, and Cape Girardeau workers volunteered to go work in other areas of the country. "We had one person in particular that flew to Albany to help, and Albany was a hot spot early on in the pandemic," Geissinger said.

As a way of supporting these employees, P&G secured corporate jets to fly the workers to and from locations because of concerns with the airline industry.

P&G also assists and provides for communities located around the plants.

Giving back

As the third largest employer in the community, P&G is a supporter of the United Way both at a corporate level and locally. Locally, P&G donates about one-third of what the United Way of Southeast Missouri raises every year between company and employee contributions.

In 2020, P&G donated an extra $45,000 specifically for the United Way COVID Relief Fund. They also donated masks to hospitals, schools and to the United Way to distribute.

"The $45,000 they contributed to our COVID Relief Fund helped jump-start donations, which surpassed $73,000," Elizabeth Shelton, executive director of United Way of Southeast Missouri said. "We were able to use that to secure a matching grant from an anonymous donor to help Southeast Missourians who have been financially impacted by the pandemic."

Geissinger added, at P&G "we continue to look for ways to do these kinds of things with the resources we have. We really try to help, first off, our employees to make sure we were safe, help their families and the community."