For Wright-Hennepin Cooperative Electric Association’s Jennifer Severson, the results from the Minnesota co-op’s most recent employee engagement survey were something to celebrate.

For several years, the vice president of human resources has been the flagbearer for the Rockford-based co-op’s initiative to build a more engaged, committed and motivated team invested in the co-op’s mission.

Thanks to Wright-Hennepin’s continuum of leadership training, its latest employee engagement score rose 10 points to 81% in 2025. At the same time, the co-op’s American Customer Satisfaction Index member satisfaction score rose several points to a record 90.

“I was so proud of our managers and the work they’ve done,” Severson said. “I can do as many trainings as I want, but they’re the ones doing the hard work.”

Severson said lower engagement marks in the past could be mostly attributed to a wave of retirements among senior leaders. Many of those leaders had been there for 30 years or more. At that time, she said, supervisors and managers “weren’t ready to step into those roles,” leading to “outsiders” filling the vacancies. COVID-19 and remote work exacerbated the uncertainty.

“There was a big gap between the vice president level and whoever was reporting to that individual,” said Severson. “So that all culminated in frustrations with leadership, turnover and ‘new management’ whom employees felt didn’t care about them. There was just so much change and so much out of employees’ control.”

Meanwhile, the co-op was seeing high metrics in other areas, such as consumer satisfaction, financial management, safety and reliability. But to continue to perform at a high level “in all of our key metrics and outcomes, we needed a talent pool and an employee pool that was commensurate with that—not just in terms of capabilities but in engagement,” said President and CEO Tim Sullivan.

The co-op made training for supervisors and managers a top priority. “Research shows the single biggest determinant of individual employee engagement is the quality of the relationship between a frontline employee and a supervisor/manager,” Sullivan said.

The co-op launched its supervisor training program in 2020 for all supervisors and managers and expanded it to team leads in 2024. Facilitated by Severson, the program covers nuts and bolts like how to make compensation decisions, conduct performance reviews or handle worker conflicts—tasks that many had never done.

“It was really just empowering them. We talked a lot about that,” Severson said. “I told them, ‘You are the manager, you get to decide, you can say no, you can tell them to do this job task they’ve never done before, or they can’t take this day off because you need coverage.’”

The co-op's second program, WHEEL, short for Wright-Hennepin Elevate, Educate and Lead, came along in 2024. Unlike supervisor training, employees apply for the program, and senior leaders select up to nine to take part. While skills development is part of the program, the goal is to enhance participants’ understanding of the co-op’s mission, vision and how they fit into it.

During the nine-month program, participants work collaboratively on real-life case studies presented by senior leaders and learn how decisions get made.

“We show them how we end up developing a strategy and how that cascades down into work plans for each department,” Sullivan said. “We challenge them to work through business problems and how to think like an executive.”

Alyssa Bidwell, the co-op's newly promoted control center supervisor, credits both programs, WHEEL and Lead, for giving her the confidence that she’s a leader with the skills to manage her team.

She said the trainings pushed her performance beyond “surface level knowledge” to a deeper understanding of how her unit fits into the overall mission of the co-op, where she’s worked for about 10 years.

“Being able to know what things may be happening behind the scenes has given me an appreciation for leadership and shown me that more goes into decision-making processes,” said the former distribution system operator.

While putting in the hard work to elevate engagement scores, the co-op never lost sight of its mission: being a top-performing organization. What changed, however, was how senior leaders communicated to employees on how to reach that goal, Sullivan said.