Justin Nelson’s biggest challenge isn’t exactly a problem. His company, dash Carrier Services LLC, is growing — fast.
The provider of emergency and public safety services and wholesale voice solutions grew by more than 60 percent in 2009 to about $15 million in revenue. But that means Nelson needs to hire more employees — so he must attract and retain the right ones.
“Until maybe the last 12 months or so, we felt like we were underemployed,” says Nelson, the CEO. “We were struggling to bring on the people that would accelerate our growth.”
Nelson, now with about 25 employees, found the solution in an unlikely place: Denver’s nonprofits. With a community involvement program that rewards volunteer hours with paid time off and bonuses, he attracts and empowers the employees he wants to have.
Smart Business spoke to Nelson about how philanthropy builds a better business.
How does community involvement attract good employees?
Typically, when you talk to [potential] employees about the community involvement plan, you can tell pretty quickly if they’re engaged and interested in that because they’ll, quite often, share what they’re doing outside of work. So we look for that as part of our interview process.
When employees talk about where they’re volunteering or where they’re spending their time, that’s an indication that they aren’t fully focused on themselves. In a company, people have to understand that there’s other people that they’re working with.
Honestly, I think it has helped us hire employees that we probably would struggle to bring on board. They look at all the aspects of employment: salary and benefits, etc. I think we’re competitive in the other aspects of employment, but we’re definitely a leader in community involvement and that’s helped us get employees who value that — and frankly, those are the employees we want.
When you talk about, ‘Not only are we looking to encourage you to hit your internal targets; we’ve got external targets and goals that we want to participate in,’ they see that we’re not just solely here to grow the company. We may not be bringing the perfect salary package to you or the perfect benefits to you, but when you look at the overall ecosystem of what we have, we’ve won candidates that way.
How does community involvement tie back to the work environment?
This is almost the quickest way that you can get somebody integrated to your team. They’re going to, very quickly, be working and communicating with other employees outside of work, which carries over to work.
You build teamship because they’re interacting with each other outside of work. That’s when you get good communication between employees. It’s pretty interesting how stepping out of the office can lead to better communication. On a day-to-day basis, you get stuck in the rut of typical communication mechanisms between people you work with. People can often be nervous about communicating across that structure. By doing it in the community environment, it almost eliminates those barriers to communication. Our employees have been doing events where they’re participating with other employees … from different teams and different levels of management.
You get a sense of camaraderie from volunteering and giving back. I don’t think anyone walks out of a volunteer event without feeling good that they’ve done something. And that directly ties back into the company because employees feel like they’re making a positive change, both outside the company and inside the company.
The core goal is community involvement and giving back. That drives employees that are interested in helping others — that’s the core value we want back in the company. In turn, you’re getting the benefit of them realizing ownership in the company because they know that we’re successful. We talk about how important it is to the company and how that helps us keep growing as a company because the culture is better.
