McNeill: All of us are trying to retain and attract employees, and so many people are asking, “Why am I working for this company?” And, “Do they have the same values as me?” At Toyota, we want to make people happy. We want to put people in cars and work through all of the stakeholders — the dealers and communities. I think that helps us during this very transitory time with a lot of employee turnover.
Mental health is really, really important to me. Everybody in this room knows a number of people [who] have things [they] deal with. I think it’s really important for people to understand that you can talk about that and that managers can help work through with people on that. I had one person — he was approached about doing a video about some of the struggles he’s had, and he asked could that be used against him if he did that? And I said, that’s not how our community is. And personally, I don’t want somebody who’s gone through life not having super challenges and never really went to a big low. If somebody was in the military and they were in combat and they’ve done valleys and they’ve gotten out of it, I feel like they can do more on my team than somebody who’s just gone on this little path. So, I think it’s helping people to see the why and really reaching out to people who are struggling.
How are you preparing for more EVs coming to dealerships?
Sanders: It’s understanding when will there be mass-market adoption on EVs and how will that evolve. And what role do we play as a lender? And what do we need to prepare for as that transition occurs? We’ve spent quite a bit of time this past year just getting educated. Helping our employees become more familiar with electric vehicles, partnering with our corporate sustainability team to understand the company’s broader commitments, but also tap into the resources around understanding what it means to have a net-zero commitment, what role our business plays in that bigger commitment for the company.
What we’re seeing is our employees are very curious about it. It’s helping them to ask the right questions around our processes, our policies, what we should be considering as far as what we’re talking about with our dealers when we’re out in the field. How do we understand the transition or the changes and aftermarket products and what that means for financing going forward?
For us, we’re still very much on the early end of understanding what the implications are for our business. But the more we can educate our teams on what EVs mean to our business, it helps them to make better decisions and help to bring those changes forward.
McNeill: We feel so well positioned for where we are in this journey. We’ve been doing hybrids for 20 years and we’re making a $70 billion investment in electric vehicles with $35 billion in BEVs. We understand that our dealers are in it with us and that they’re needed to help this to be adopted large scale — in terms of having all of our best problem-solvers, working through and helping to make sure we have the right infrastructure at the right time.
I think it’s going to be a really exciting 10 years and is just important that the other things come along with it, like the incentives continue to be fair and equally applied and that they do come out so that the we can sell as many cars as we need to meet all of the new standards coming out.
