My company - and our parent company - engage in this quarterly employee satisfaction surveys, which are anonymous, and ask actually important questions about the job and work environment.

Because...

Three years ago, it surfaced at an all-company meeting that employees were not happy, and were scattered and had no specific focus. The company meeting kinda derailed into a discussion about employee happiness.

My contribution was, "What do we do? Who do we serve? Where is our North Star that guides us in the right direction, when we have a question about which road to take?"

The CEO grabbed onto that idea of our "North Star", and ran with it.

The entire company basically stopped for about 2 months as we brought in outside facilitators to drive brainstorming and discussion sessions around employee happiness, the direction the company was going, and what our "North Star" should be.

Those results were codified in TWO WEEKS into a series of actionable items that the whole company voted on, and ratified by like a 94% margin.

So in one quarter, the company came up with new vision and mission statements, a set of 6 core principles that defined how we do business and who we do it for, and revamped the break areas, and all of the cubicles across the company (400 employees).

It was the first time in my 35 years of working that I have seen a company take employee feedback to heart, and make meaningful - sweeping! - changes across the board.

Every year we place in the top handful of "Best Places to Work in Washington State", AND our work vibe and mojo has extended all the way up to our parent corporation, which is a 150-year old German company. Our CEO now sits on the Board for the parent company. (Partially due to the types of products we sell, and how we sell them, but also as a leader in corporate culture.)

Pretty cool, overall.

But I'm still leaving.