At Extra Space Storage, we believe our greatest asset is our employees. From the people who work in our National Sales Center to the managers operating our self storage facilities across the nation, the team behind Extra Space Storage is what makes our company better every single day.
Each quarter, we give out the EXTRAordinary Employee of the Quarter award. These aren’t given to people who just do their jobs. They’re awarded to those who go above and beyond in demonstrating our core values, and the nominations are submitted anonymously by other employees, team leaders, or entire departments.
Below are the EXTRAordinary winners from Q1 2020 featuring the nomination statements from their peers!
Corey Tenney – Software Senior Engineer, Store Support Center
“Corey has consistently provided excellent service to the Accounting department. These are a few of the recent items that stand out: 1) The corporate CTM expense tool needed some updates to handle a new approach for budgeting at the DM level this year. On a short timeline, Corey made this update and also added a handful of other improvements. 2) Our accounting system receives MANY different sources of data each days—think Breeze, Omni, eBuilder, Concur, bank activity, etc. Corey is always looking for ways to make these integrations more reliable and efficient, which ultimately provides a better working experience for our entire department. 3) Occasionally, things break or software updates don’t go as planned. Corey is always there, no matter what time of day or night. He worked all through President’s Day weekend to coordinate among multiple departments at the SSC and external consultants to fix a significant issue with our accounting system. Everything was fixed by the time our department got back to work after the holiday. We are very grateful for all that Corey does for our department!”
Mike Ferrigno – District Manager, Walker Division
“Mike has always been a professional leader through our almost 15 years working together. During these very troubling times, he has stepped up even more than ever as our leader. He has gone above and beyond to make sure that everyone has been as safe as possible during COVID-19. He has quickly responded via phone or email to every question and concern. He also has tirelessly scoured everywhere possible to get cleaning supplies and safety gear to make sure we all are protected. He has went out of his way to make sure he gets you what you need timely. He has kept in constant touch with all his sites and really needs some much deserved credit from us all. He is a true asset to our team, the company, and our brand promise. He truly makes Extra Space Storage a great place to work. Thank you!”
Keith Harten – Instructional Design Developer, Store Support Center
“With the rollout of Breeze, our new point of sale system, one of the challenges of taking it to the store is ensuring our store employees know how to use it. We integrated a user help tool called WalkMe with Breeze, a tool that can guide the user through the process of completing actions within the app, as well as provide other resources to them. Keith has worked with us from the beginning of WalkMe’s implementation, building out dozens of walkthroughs, tooltips, videos, links, documentation, and more. Keith was willing to learn the technical impact of this new tool to help build out this content. Keith has an eye for user learning and training, and his expertise has helped us create the right type of training for our users. Because of his work, our store employees are learning how to successfully use Breeze with only hours of training. Because of Keith, Breeze is an even better product. Because of his service to the product, our employees are more empowered to take care of our customers.”
McKall Morris – Corporate Communications Manager, Store Support Center
“McKall has gone above and beyond during the COVID-19 crisis. She may have thought a job in corporate communications would be boring at a storage company until a pandemic hit. She’s been an important member of the COVID-19 task force, helping the committee to communicate important updates to the field, the NSC, and the SSC. She has updated the intranet to reflect the current situation, including drafting FAQs to help answer the questions that she sees out there. She has been instrumental in each company call to ensure the information that is most meaningful is getting delivered to everyone. She’s been an integral part of keeping our employees feeling connected during a disconnected time.”
McKenzy MacKay – FP&A Senior Analyst, Store Support Center
“McKenzy is always happy and willing to help us all out. She’s always had a good attitude, but it’s become even more evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. While McKenzy had to reforecast each property’s budgets and was extremely busy, our team also became busier and needed more data. As we always do, we went to McKenzy. And as she always does, McKenzy went above and beyond to help us out and get her actual job done on top of that.”
David DeVillavicencio – District Manager, Pontillo Division
“There are several reasons to nominate District Manager David DeVillavicencio for the EXTRAordinary Award. David continues to serve as a positive example of what it means to embody the company values. In challenging times, we often begin to truly recognize and appreciate the leadership of those that often goes unrecognized and under-appreciated. It is in those times that those who live to serve and exhibit our company’s values become more apparent, and this can most certainly be said of David. In recent months, while many have worked diligently to create calm in chaos and structure in uncertainty, none have done so with such grace, humility, and consistency as David. In the events of COVID-19, David has served as a team player by sharing best practices and without solicitation, identifying sources of supplies for various districts. He has demonstrated excellence in his effective communications with his district, DM peers, and company departments to ensure that operations moved forward with efficiency. He would often be the first leader to recognize an opportunity for improvement and consequently engage others and follow through to achieve a resolution that could then be passed on to others. It would not be uncommon to see an email from David first thing in the morning or after hours. Throughout the first quarter of the year, David’s passion could be felt in his tireless efforts to help others remember that they are not alone and that there was support whenever needed.”
Randy James – NSC Team Lead, National Sales Center
“Randy has been an exceptional asset to the company and invaluable at the NSC. He works tirelessly to ensure that his phone and click to chat agents are delivering the best customer experience both on their sales and service calls. I’ve heard him time and time again remind them to go above and beyond for our customers. Any agents I interact with, both on his team or on the floor, sing his praises, and agents are excited and look forward to working with him on Thursdays nights when he closes. Randy is able to quickly adapt to changes in his environment and works well under pressure. With click to chat, he is consistently overcoming obstacles with programs, reporting, and technical issues, all while juggling sales and customer service inquiries from his agents who work in-office and remotely. I’ve personally seen him on the phone with the click to chat vendor trying to troubleshoot an issue with the application all while answering agent questions on teams and dealing with a build-up in the queue. He stays cool and collected under pressure. His positive attitude and work ethic are both contagious and inspiring. He is able to juggle multiple projects on top of his day to day job duties. One such project is utilizing Microsoft Power Apps. Randy went out of his way to learn how to use Power Apps to streamline the documentation processes at the NSC. Team Leads are now able to document, track and manage all their coaching, disciplinary actions, and agents interactions in one convenient place. He is consistently asking for user input and increasing user-friendliness. He also used Power Apps to create an agent facing Y-Jacking form, which allows agents to ditch the paper version of this form and use a trackable digital version. This increased agent productivity and saved us money! He was able to use the same application to help the service center test track and manage customer emails and enable agents to quickly make TRA calculations while on the call with a customer. This benefited both the agent and customer experiences. Thank you, Randy, for continuing to be amazing!”
Daniel Espinosa – District Manager, Verboncoeur Division
“Daniel joined Extra Space Storage in Q1 and almost right away he was faced with a challenging situation. COVID-19 hit, and per the governor’s orders, stores had to close. Daniel reacted quickly and was able to partner with the DVP, Legal team, and others to come up with a plan to operate within the governor’s orders. Daniel helped to come up with the idea of Command Centers to field calls and process rentals for multiple stores. He was able to implement and execute the Command Centers and work with his new team to adjust to doing business in this way. He had to work with our partners to understand the plan for their stores and work with the governor’s office to ensure we were in compliance. Because of Daniel’s efforts, New Mexico continues to bring in new rentals and serve our current customers despite the challenging circumstances. Welcome to Extra Space Storage, Daniel! We are glad to have you on the team.”
Nominations for EXTRAordinary Employee of the Quarter for Q2 2020 have recently closed, and the winners will be announced soon. Check back for more from Extra Space Storage!