The Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards winner Echo Market Research
Editor’s note: Echo Market Research is the winner of the 2022 Best Place to Work Award which is a category in the Marketing Research and Insight Excellence Awards. This award is for a marketing research organization with a proven track record of investing time and resources into the betterment of their employees – from entry-level to management. To find out more about the awards click here.
Echo Market Research invests time and resources to help every team member achieve their goals, including paying for formal coursework and certifications that they can take with them throughout their career. Generous benefits help keep team members energized and feeling appreciated, including a rotating paid FreePlay Friday for people to do what they love outside of work, a Rockstar award that recognizes going above and beyond and a new biannual award, FreePlay VayCay, where four team members will receive $2,000 toward a long weekend away to the destination of their choosing.
What changes/implementations have made the most impact within your company culture?
This would be a question that people on my team might answer differently. From my perspective, we aim to create non-traditional rewards systems – like rotating Fridays off. Additionally, bringing in people at all levels to share in our strategy session is critical. We accomplish that through a shadow board. We also adopt a training style of master-teach-master-teach, much like Montessori school. We also aim to work closely with our team to make sure we understand their goals and help them achieve them through departmental rotation and actual college courses.
How has transparent communication affected employees and their work?
We work on this constantly because as we departmentalized, we became more siloed. In order to combat that we brought some of our more junior people into our leadership calls. This allows information to flow easily through departments and for them to problem-solve together. We talk a lot about interdependence in departments.
Where do you get the ideas for new employee programs?
Sometimes we see other companies doing things and then try them, some of it just makes good sense and some of it we brainstorm around what problems we are aiming to solve. It's really a combination of all those things – always trying to balance the business goals with individual goals.