Pros
Yes, this is a review from the CEO of IMPACT, but I hope you read this and take it seriously. Everything we've done over the last four years has been to make IMPACT the best possible to place for our people. We understand that if we can attract and retain the best people, they'll deliver for those who put their trust in us, and we'll have a superior product and company. Creating the best place to work has remained one of our core objectives, and every quarter we work towards improving, all based on feedback from our employee NPS, employee advisory board, manager/employee one-on-ones, and regular feedback meetings held by our talent team. Because of this, we’ve built a great culture for both on-site and remote employees, our turnover rate is exceptionally low for an agency, and our people have nominated and helped us win awards for our culture. Although we want our people to be at IMPACT for a long time, we understand the company is not for everyone and sometimes things change. We can only keep people on the team who are performing at a high level, otherwise it creates a hardship for the entire organization. But more importantly, if someone is struggling at IMPACT, they need to find something that’s a better fit for them so they don’t waste time and can continue to grow in their career. Over the years, we’ve had to have tough conversations with several team members when it was time to make a change, but, one thing I think we do differently at IMPACT is that we work with employees through their transitions so we can achieve the best, mutually-beneficial outcome for everyone -- even if it take a few months. We’re happy to go out of our way to help our transitioning employees and many have come back to us saying how valuable this was to them. Most of them have gone on to find great jobs that are perfect for them and we couldn’t be happier, and in almost every case, it’s a great experience for everyone. In 2015, we created a company vision which the entire team was invited to contribute to. That vision, in addition to being a great place to work, included us being recognized for the quality of our work, holding industry events where we could showcase the thought leadership of our team and interact with some of the brightest and most-respected people in our field. I’m proud to say, we’ve achieved that vision a year early, and we’re now focused on our bigger vision for 2020, also co-created by the entire team. In terms of compensation, we continue to focus on improving pay and benefits. We have made huge strides in this area in the past four years and believe they are above average, but they can always be better. OK - I may be biased… I get that, but I will invite you to go to our team page, ping anyone at our company, and validate anything you’d like about our culture. We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished and apologies for giving myself a thumbs up on the “rate the CEO” section. I try very hard. :)
Cons
No doubt, we have a lot we still need to work on. First, we want to improve our benefits even further. In the last few years, we rolled out a larger contribution to health insurance, a 401k with a 3% match, and up to 8 weeks of maternity/paternity leave, but I’d really like to see us increase our health insurance contribution, specifically for families, and up our 401k match. I’m also very focused on finding the right plan for employees to have a path towards ownership of IMPACT, which I think we’ll have in 2019. Our office is cool but certainly isn’t at Google-level. I think there’s an opportunity to improve there. The reason for deficiencies in these areas is because we pay our people very well, and most of our budget goes to salaries. I’m confident that we’ll address all of this in the next 6-12 months.
