207 - TZL - Burke Pemberton

hierarchical business models were broken and we wanted to subscribe to the belief that people are inherently innately good and want to do good work if you just, provide them with the tools and resources to be able to do good work and to develop professionally and then get out of their way. And I think what so often happens in traditional structures is we hire people because they're professional at a job and then we sort of take all the power away from them and tell them here are all the rules, here's how we expect you to work and how you expected to do things. We just didn't want to do it that way anymore. It stifles innovation and productivity and we feel like the workers have the knowledge economy, have a lot of their base, you know, the layers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs for this new generation of workers. They have a lot of their needs met now and so, they want the opportunity to be able to be creative and explore and innovate, and really pursue their own passions. And so that autonomy piece is probably one of the more prominent of our core values. And what we've really done is try to create a firm that has structured autonomy where you're not required to be in an office if you don't want to be. You don't punch a clock. You're not here nine to five. Everybody in the firm has KPIs that they know that they need to hit. They have a billing number they need to hit so it doesn't matter when you work, where you work, or how you work. And we try and provide everybody with good standards and strategies and resources that they can use but then they can go out and work the way they want to work. And, you started off by saying how did you grow so much through the pandemic? I think, when everybody started working from home, we were like, well, that's what we've already been doing. We have three offices in Denver, San Francisco, and San Diego now, but we've got team members all over the globe and we found a way to make that work. And that works in a consulting environment when, obviously, like our engineers have to go on site, sometimes, and our project managers that are doing ‘T’ eyes or are on site. But a lot of our consultants are mostly working on their laptops and on Zoom anyway, so that transition wasn't a challenge. And I think, really just that shift towards the results focus and allowing people to have that structured autonomy has been what's enabled us to sort of power through that transition to this new hybrid work environment. And then just some of the other values you mentioned, they're just ingrained in who we are. You do those core visioning exercises, and you say, would you work for a company if it didn't subscribe to this value? If the answer is no, then you know it's a core value. We are all passionate sustainability people. We care about the stewardship of the environment. We wanted equity and social justice and that's the impact we want to have on the world. And so, building an organization around core values around a purpose and a mission that way where people feel like when they wake up in the morning, that they're going to go out and have an impact and do what they want to do. I think it's kind of a winning formula and it's really exciting to be a part of.

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