Making a Difference

With the holiday season fast approaching, it is time to take a good, hard look at what is important to us.

Our company has an underlying belief and motto that is the essence of our core values – do the right thing and make a difference.  While it is often clear when a decision is the ‘right’ one, how do we really know that we are making a difference?

We know that we have a vital role to play with each and every one of our customers. Whether we are handling calls from panicked people stuck in a Toronto elevator, a gentleman requiring oxygen delivered to his Hamilton home, or a lone worker checking in from a remote area of Alberta, we are an integral and important part of our customers’ communications plans.  We make a difference because our customers, and our customers’ callers, depend on us and we do not let them down.

It is more difficult for us to determine whether or not we are making a difference in the lives and well-being of our employees.  We are no less committed to this goal than to meeting the needs of our customers.  But how do we measure how an employer, through policies, actions, and words, is creating an environment which encourages every individual employee to ‘make a difference’?

We can’t pull out a checklist similar to the customized templates we use for quality control measurements.  We can’t follow employees home to check how they are interacting with family and friends.

We do ask our employees what we can do to ensure that they feel ‘good’ about our workplace and the incredibly important tasks that they perform, and we are responsive to input, but that isn’t going to tell us the whole story.

Words are good; actions are better.  We know that our employees make a difference by what we find out that they do not tell us:

• We know when a senior CSR in our Hamilton office worked a busy day shift then baked 16 loaves to sell in our fundraising bake sale.
• We know when this same woman, and a young male colleague, joined the ‘shave to save’ breast cancer awareness and fundraising initiative, proudly showing off their bald heads and the $1,700 they helped to raise.
• We know when the Toronto staff members hold a surprise ‘high tea’ for a colleague – because she likes tea.
•  We know when a manager is presented with special recognition at our annual Dolly awards not by senior management, but by the staff members that she hired and trained.
• We know when children of staff members are not only welcomed with open arms and hugs during their regular visits, but when they ask to return again and again.
• We know that our staff members make a difference when we start counting the hours spent volunteering and helping others.

There are countless examples of how AnswerPlus staff members make a difference, whether it be to an association or group that needs help, to a specific family in need, or to each other.

We are so very proud that AnswerPlus staff members ‘do the right thing’, and during this season of thanksgiving and sharing, we thank each and every one of them for making a difference.