Sometimes, when you work full time, it is hard to give back to your community or get involved in volunteer projects. It also is tough when you’re always on the road traveling for that job.
Because finding a way to blend the groups and causes you care about with a busy life is challenging, one company came up with a unique way to help. Daugherty Business Solutions decided that it would focus locally – both in terms of how far its employees have to travel and how they can give back to the cities where the company is based.
“We care about what they care about and we invest in what they care about,” said Managing Director Coleen Finnegan.
For example, by focusing on locally based businesses as part of its work as a full-service IT management consulting strategy firm, Daugherty can offer its business-solution driven work, but take the most grueling aspect out of it – the regular travel from city to city to city, Finnegan said.
This not only helps clients and focuses the work, it ensures employees are not getting worn down by the road, which is common in this kind of work. Plus, workers can then focus on other things that matter to them, such as their community and volunteer work.
“We’re small enough that’s we able to be nimble and creative with the way we engage with our customers but big enough to have support from a larger company,” Finnegan said. “Being local, people can go to work where they live. That truly creates work-life balance in a field where that otherwise can be difficult.”
For many workers, no matter what their age, employee benefits that highlight things like a work-life balance are more important than money, surveys show. The 2018 SHRM Employee Benefits survey showed that 92% of employees said that benefits are important to their overall job satisfaction, with 29% of them citing their benefits package as a top reason to look for another job.
Another way that Ron Daugherty wanted to change the way his industry does business is through offering his consultants a way to get continuous training right where they work. So the company offers regular training online and offers it in a way that employees can start it up whenever they have time.
This program, known internally as Engage, offers workers a way to sit in on lunch and learns at other locations as well, giving them a way to pick up new skills or try something else within their field to expand their knowledge of the industry, Finnegan said.
“There’s probably not a day that there isn’t something from a training perspective that’s not available for our consultants,” Finnegan said.
In a more traditional sense, Daugherty also offers lots of internal events to encourage its consultants to find ways to balance work and family. There’s a summertime event that focuses on family, heading to the local zoo so everyone can have a day together.
“We appreciate the families of our employees because we know they give a lot of time and effort to our business and we want to appreciate them as well,” Finnegan said.
In the winter, the company throws a formal party where an employee and his or her spouse or significant other can get dressed up and enjoy a night out together, Finnegan said. This creates a date-night opportunity that employees truly enjoy, she said.
The company also offers a kind of Happy Hour event every quarter, bringing all of its employees together across its lines of service. The four lines of service normally wouldn’t get a chance to talk, network and get to know one another in a casual setting, and this event helps make sure they get those times to slow down, meet and chat, Finnegan said.
“We like getting people together so they can network in a real way,” she said.
