We got the email a few weeks ago. Universal Events Inc. earned Great Place to Work Certification for another cycle. I was glad. I was not surprised. And I refuse to treat it as a marketing badge.
Repeat certification means something specific. It means the people inside the building voted with their answers. Anonymously. Year after year. If the answer stayed true over multiple cycles, the answer is probably the truth.
What we actually do
We do not have a ping pong table. I am sorry if that disappoints anyone. What we have, I hope, is clarity.
We are clear on the why. We serve mission driven organizations so they can serve their communities. When a Tuesday afternoon feels hard, that why is the thing that gets us through the next email.
We are clear on expectations. People do not have to guess what a good week looks like. They know. Their manager knows. The definition of done is written down, not vibed.
We are clear on respect. Not in a poster way. In the small ways. We start meetings on time. We end them on time. We close Slack on the weekend. We apologize when we are wrong. We mean it when we say thank you.
A moment I am proud of
A few months ago, a teammate pushed back hard on a decision I had made. She was right. I was wrong. I said so in front of the team. We changed the plan. She did better work after that, and I was a better leader the next time a similar question came up.
That exchange is why I trust our certification. A place where a junior colleague can correct a CEO in a meeting, and the meeting ends with a better decision, is a place that has earned what the survey says about it.
Friday at six
People first leadership is easy when nothing is on fire. The real test is Friday at six when a nonprofit client has an emergency and the team has to decide how hard to lean in. The healthy version of that is not heroism. It is trust. People lean in because they trust the rest of us to lean in next time. That trust gets built on the quiet Tuesdays, not the dramatic Fridays.
Why this matters for the work
A company that does not treat its team well cannot credibly serve nonprofits. The work is too hard and the stakes are too high for fragile teams. The clients we serve deserve collaborators who slept, who took their lunch break, who were allowed to be honest when something was not working.
Great Place to Work is a proxy for that. The survey asks the questions that really matter. If the team answers them well, the company can be trusted with missions that matter.
Thanks
To the team: thank you. You know who you are. You have made this place what it is. The certification belongs to you more than it belongs to anyone in my office.
Next year we will try to do better. That is also the plan.