Our values
Our CHS values are the foundation for everything we do as an organization. Whether on the road, in the fields or moving grain around the world, these are the values that guide our every decision:
We’re proud to support a culture that empowers our people to truly live our values.
Integrity
At CHS, we aim to do business with integrity. It’s what the cooperative system was built on and part of our foundation as a company. Our unwavering commitment to compliance and integrity stems from being a values-driven company, including practicing integrity in everything we do. We owe it to our owners, our customers, our communities, and ourselves to always act with integrity by doing the right thing.
Our Code of Conduct provides our employees with a road map for doing the right thing. Our culture empowers employees to raise their hand and say something if something doesn’t line up with our values or the code. Employees can also reach out to their team’s integrity champion for support in gaining confidence around making decisions with integrity, speaking up and maintaining compliance.
Business partners are also important contributors to helping CHS achieve and maintain its commitment to doing the right thing. The CHS Business Partner Code of Conduct (view in Spanish or Portuguese) explains the standards of doing business in an ethical and legally compliant manner and applies to third-party partners who conduct business with or on behalf of CHS.
Safety
We value the well-being of our employees, owners, customers and communities, and are committed to advancing how we approach safety. We strive to cultivate a safety-driven culture that brings about the presence of safety by freely and candidly communicating with each other in a way that builds trust, shares our beliefs and reinforces our Safety value. All employees are empowered to stop work if there is a threat of imminent danger so they can take action to reduce exposure to hazards.
We also invest in our employees’ safety and well-being by providing additional resources, programs and education to support a safe workplace for everyone. CHS recognizes several employees each year who identify a safety or health concern and help implement solutions that reduce or eliminate employee exposure to safety hazards with a Safety Excellence Award. Our belief is that celebrating the accomplishments of our workforce will inspire more employees to create and execute safety improvements.
CHS supports community safety around our facilities, as well, including helping equip our communities with the tools and knowledge to prevent exposure to common grain storage hazards, such as entrapment.
Inclusion
We believe excellence and growth stem from diverse thinking.
- We are committed to fostering an inclusive culture where everyone is welcomed, respected and empowered to succeed.
- We believe different perspectives and experiences will enable innovation and collaboration and drive growth.
Internally, we focus on three key inclusive behaviors to support our culture and value of inclusion: creating openness, welcoming differences, and leading with bravery. In addition, through our employee resource groups, all employees have opportunities to network and build relationships. This work helps us improve our employee experience and engagement.
Cooperative spirit
Our value of cooperative spirit is at the heart of who we are as a company – it’s about working together for shared success. Our predecessors used seed money from their own pockets to create cooperatives to provide goods and services that helped rural communities grow and accomplish more than one farmer could on their own. That was the beginning of true cooperative spirit in action.
Cooperative spirit shows up in how we work together every day as colleagues and coworkers. When we collaborate and share our time, our skills and our ideas, we show a spirit that helps us achieve our purpose. When we think about cooperative spirit, we also think about the work CHS does every day to strengthen the communities in which we live. This includes investments the CHS Foundation is making in building the next generation of leaders and CHS Community Giving investing in organizations to teach children how to be safe and to address mental health issues in agriculture. It’s also about the time we spend volunteering in our hometowns and partnering with neighbors and friends to keep our communities strong.
Cooperative spirit is that winning combination of working together better and strengthening the communities where we live, it’s perfectly aligned with our purpose to create connections to empower agriculture.
