More than 2,300 companies were nominated or asked to participate in the 2018 Top Workplaces contest by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and its partner, Energage (formerly Workplace Dynamics). Employees across the metro area responded to print and online solicitations that began appearing in September.
Using survey results, a list of 150 workplaces was compiled, consisting of 25 large companies (listed below; 500 or more employees), 50 midsize companies (150-499 employees) and 75 small companies (149 or fewer employees).
The top small, midsize and large workplace leaders discussed how to build a strong culture and how to keep your mission at the forefront.
Answers have been edited for brevity and clarity.
What are key components of the firm’s culture?
Janine Brown, partner-in-charge of Alston & Bird's Atlanta office: Client service and teamwork are the cornerstones of all that we do. Alston & Bird's culture and core values have been cultivated for more than a century. They define who we are and how we interact with our clients and with each other. A lot has changed about the business of law in that time, but our culture of collegiality, teamwork, loyalty, diversity, fairness and professional development have always been, and continue to be, the guiding principles by which we measure ourselves.
Rob Forman, chief operating officer, SalesLoft: We define culture as values consistently applied. As we put our values into action, the behavioral environment around us, that is our culture. Then in that culture, we have a high-trust, high-performing environment where we can have lots of perks that people can enjoy.
What is your company doing to retain workers and keep them satisfied?
Pat Flood, regional operating partner, Supreme Lending's Southeast region: Our turnover rate last year was less than 5 percent. We hire well. Most people focus as employers on what experiences and talent people have. We focus on whether or not the things that we think are important in life are important to the folks that we're talking to. We take the time to make sure that we're hiring right, meaning our values and theirs are compatible. I think they get an authentic experience, which is what they heard when they were talking to us.
Kyle Porter, CEO, SalesLoft: Give them meaningful work, big goals and tie those goals to the major outcomes for our customers that they can be proud of.
Brown: We manage our low retention rates not only by offering competitive salaries and benefits packages but also by providing opportunities for our employees to learn, engage in the community and bring their whole selves to work. Our Atlanta office has a "21 Club," consisting of 75 staff employees who have a tenure of 20 years or more with the firm. The club hosts special celebrations and meets quarterly to celebrate the firm's rich history and to discuss how to role model our core values as the workplace continues to evolve.
How do you use technology to positively influence your workplace culture?
Porter: We use aggressive video conferencing so our people can connect with our customers, prospects and each other via video. We have a system called Pingboard — an employee directory with neat facts, games to remember their names. We use Slack for internal communications and have neat channels, like the "thank you" channel, where someone gives thanks to someone else for what they've done for them and the business.
Brown: We believe that technology positively impacts our workplace by enabling productivity while providing a secure environment protecting the data of both our clients and the firm itself. Some examples include complete remote capabilities, especially when inclement weather conditions prevent easy access to our buildings. Similarly, on-the-go mobile device options include email and network access, along with time entry and firm directory apps. Our firm-supplied laptops have video capabilities and built-in software for screen sharing and collaboration, and we have interlinked video conference rooms in all our offices. These recently updated rooms are used for meetings and events, including a monthly firmwide video conference with presentations by lawyers and firm leadership. Our firm portal serves as our communications hub, allowing us to share news and important information. It includes links to our Pro Bono site that lists opportunities to volunteer and participate in community programs, a sustainability page to promote green initiatives, and an Alston & Bird alumni website.
Flood: We have associates spread out through a number of markets, and we now have a new studio so we can do livestreaming to our associates. We can participate either in a business meeting or a motivational meeting. So we're using the medium to communicate, remind, encourage, motivate and teach.
What do you do to encourage new ideas from employees?
Forman: Every month, they vote on one thing that is sort of annoying them that we want to fix. So don't come without a solution. It could be noise. It could be chairs. Every month, they bubble it up and then we allocate resources to solve the problem. That's where Pingboard came from. They said, it's hard to know who works where and what their names are. They found the solution. We bought the software and now we use it.
Brown: Even the most junior professionals know that their ideas will be heard, so brainstorming often occurs organically over lunch or in meetings. To further encourage input, we conduct town hall meetings with senior human resources leadership, we have Atlanta office committees for pro bono and community service, as well as diversity and inclusion, and we maintain other formats for continuous feedback in employee reviews, internal surveys and an online suggestion box.
Flood: We tell people all the time there are no bad ideas. We're always interested in getting better. If there's anything we can ever do to get better, we ought to discover that and everybody here has a responsibility to contribute to it.
How do employees have an opportunity to voice opinions or give feedback to their supervisors?
Brown: Both formal and informal feedback is welcome here, in the form of town hall meetings, feedback sessions and the work of our many committees throughout the Atlanta office. In fall 2017, we conducted hourlong feedback luncheons with five groups of Atlanta legal administrative assistants during which they were introduced to a new feedback communication model. They were then given an open forum to share successes and challenges with their manager, the director of human resources and diversity and our chief human resources officer.
Flood: Everyone in the organization has access to me. They can call me. They can email me. I don't have an administrative assistant or a secretary, and I have hired every single person that's employed here. I build a personal relationship with them, and they feel comfortable to pick up the phone and call me.
How does the company help employees stay current?
Forman: If someone will invest in and commit to reading something, I'll buy them the book, if they'll write me the summary. Other leaders and department heads do it, too. We specifically like the books because of the quality of depth, but there are other programs. There are certain video screencasts that we subscribe them to. They're doing that constantly. One of the big things we do is we just encourage them to take the time to do it. We've bought outside speakers (such as Charlie Paparelli, Rusty Gordon and Lisa McLeod). We just want them to be hearing from others as well.
Brown: We encourage an entrepreneurial spirit, providing opportunities to unleash our talents in order to grow professionally and personally. Examples of how we promote this philosophy include continuous culture and service delivery training, technology training sessions, communication preferences training, personal and financial wellness education, business development seminars, individual career coaching, formal and organic mentorship opportunities, conference attendance, client-involved learning events and many more.
Flood: There's a professional license update that's required annually, and so we fund all of that, which is not insignificant in terms of its cost. We do an awful lot of training, particularly with new associates when they come in, not just on the job, but we have outsource programs (he estimates they invest about $1,500 in the first year for each new hire). And then we do a number of different regulatory and otherwise trainings in the organization. It amounts to a pretty substantial amount of money every year that we do put investments in.
What hiring activity has your company experienced recently? In what ways is this the result of changes to your hiring processes?
Forman: We want to hire over 100 people (in 2018). We recently hired a chief people officer. She is continuing on a lot of things that Kyle and I built in the early days and enhancing some things that we've wanted to grow. We need a lot of great people. That means we have to work really hard to find them and recruit them.
Brown: The newly designed website has been one of the biggest changes affecting our hiring process. We were able to revise our career pages to include more videos and employee testimonials. The website's main audience is prospective clients, but we have heard from multiple candidates that our website was a factor in their attraction to the firm.
Flood: We grew from, maybe five years ago, having 50 or 60 people to having around 165 associates. We feel like the next couple of years will be between 150 to 200 associates. We did almost $1.2 billion in (revenue) last year. We financed about 5,500 homes. So we're big enough. I don't want to get so big that I lose a sense of personal relationship with the folks that are here.
How often do you look at your benefits package, and what is a recent update?
Forman: We revisit our benefits package usually annually. Sometimes ideas will come up quarterly. One recent shift we made is that we shifted the mix on how much we pay for family plans versus individuals so that we could pay more for people who do have families. We pay 100 percent of it for individuals, but we increased the percentage of people we pay for people with families.
Brown: Alston & Bird monitors our benefits offerings on an ongoing basis through a variety of sources, including surveys, insurance consultants, seminars and roundtable networking. In fact, an industry trend led to a recent change in the parental leave policy for attorneys that now includes a flex-time component to assist attorneys with the transition to/from the workplace either before or after their leave.
What leadership principles do you abide by?
Brown: I personally think it's incredibly important to be a good listener, and that's an essential part of leadership.
Forman: Leadership is fundamentally about taking care of people. It's about not being in charge, but taking care of those in your charge. Another leadership principal is around servant leadership. Our role is to set direction, to make decisions, but a lot of it is to get out of the way and enable our people to do what they're good at, and then take accountability if something's off track and pass off credit if something goes right.
Flood: My first responsibility is to be a good and godly Christian man. What I'm required to do is treat them better than they deserve to be treated because that's really kind of the Christian life — not judge them, accept them for who they are and to try to do anything and everything I can in my power to influence them to emerge to be better than that.
What advice would you give executives about building a strong company culture?
Brown: An organization focuses first on its mission, and for us, it's excellent client service. It's our relentless passion, focus, drive toward client service that then builds our culture. You say, "OK, here's our mission. What is it we need to ensure that we are doing together to create a culture that will help us deliver on our mission?"
Forman: I would encourage leaders to do the work of finding out what are their values, crystallizing them and sharing them with their organization so people know what to expect.
