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.
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.
Code of Conduct
Business partners
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 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
The well-being of our people, owners, customers and communities is our most critical concern.
CHS is committed to making advancements in how we approach safety. The most concerning safety challenge we face every day is preventing serious injuries and fatalities. As such, we are creating a safety culture among our employees that prevents serious injuries and fatalities.
Our best opportunity to make improvements is through hearing people’s concerns, so we give our employees the permission to stop work and raise concerns when they feel something isn’t safe.
We also support community safety around our facilities, including helping local first responders prepare to handle emergencies related to agricultural operations.
CHS supports grain bin safety
Read more about how CHS provides grain bin safety equipment and training.
Inclusion
We believe excellence and growth stem from diverse thinking. We can create a more productive, innovative and positive work environment that drives better business results when we have a strong appreciation for our differences and commonality as employees. We continue to focus on creating a more inclusive culture where everyone is welcomed, respected, and empowered to succeed. By equipping and empowering leaders to lead inclusively with clarity and accountability, we are strengthening our inclusion and diversity (I&D) foundation.
Our multi-year journey is giving teams the necessary resources to help them on an individual level by offering opportunities for employees to gain a deeper understanding of how inclusion impacts their day-to-day experiences. Moving forward, we are focusing on balancing immediate actions with ongoing education and facilitating long-term change. By leaning into our employee resource groups (ERGs) to help in creating education through events and engagement, we will look to expand ERGs. Creating a culture of inclusion is and will continue to be a top priority at CHS.
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.
Farmers Supply Cooperative puts community first
October is National Co-op Month. Learn about the Farmers Supply Cooperative and how it embodies cooperative spirit.
Flowers in the family
A CHS Foundation grant is helping high school sophomore Ella Braker reach her goal of someday owning the floral business owned by her mom.