Our people are our first priority. We believe that only companies with a positive culture can deliver good work. So, we constantly engage in shaping a safe, supportive, equitable, and inclusive workplace, where our employees’ whole lives are valued, and where people at any professional level can grow their careers.
Retaining and engaging our people
One of the most critical aspects of executing our business strategy is maintaining our long-standing client relationships and knowledge. Employee retention and growth is key to that strategy. If we can retain our top talent, we are better suited to act on our purpose. Our goal has been and continues to be to demonstrate a better retention rate than the industry average, and we’ve consistently achieved that goal. Like our peer firms, we’ve seen our voluntary turnover rates increase in the last two years, and while we’re not where we want to be, we continue to retain our employees at a higher rate than industry average. Our desire to retain key talent means we continue to focus on the whole employee experience. So, in 2022, we focused on completing the rollout of our Performance Enablement program, engaging our employees in envisioning an organization designed to empower and facilitate career growth, and continuing our communication and engagement efforts.
Performance Enablement is all about supporting our employee’s success and development. Following our 2021 launch, which rolled out a new platform for employee development, including tools to receive and request anytime feedback, in 2022 we focused on providing our employees and managers with training and tools that facilitate great conversations and employee development.
In keeping with our focus on creating an experience for employees that encourages retention, we engaged employees in redesigning our organization to better support our strategic objectives. Following a facilitated, inclusive process, our employees developed an organizational concept that our leadership then worked to realize throughout 2022 for implementation mid-2023. This organization was designed to ease access to the best possible project teams for our clients, and to project and other developmental opportunities for our employees.
Striving for equity
As our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) vision states, we believe that complex teams working together in an equitable, inclusive space provides the best opportunity for achieving our vision of clean water, safe environment, healthy communities, and happy people. Our success is tied to a culture that embraces our differences so that everyone can bring their whole, authentic selves to work. When our people are supported to reach their full potential, we provide the most innovative, sound, and effective solutions. Thus, we continue to roll out communications, new practices, analyses and training as part of our DEI strategy.
In 2022, our commitment to advance equity within Woodard & Curran focused on racial equity through the launch of comprehensive racial equity education. Through this work, our leaders are learning about how to positively impact racial equity in our organization and working to apply those learnings.
In 2022, we also began the process of developing our 2026 DEI Vision and Strategy, which will outline our next three years’ goals. As an organization, we are not where we would like to be in terms of our representation, and we continue to commit significant time and investment to advancing equity as an organization in 2022 and beyond.
