Staffmark Group Wins ClearlyRated’s Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award
This year, ClearlyRated has the honor of recognizing our first ever cohort of 10 Year Diamond Award winning firms! This award is the crowning achievement for Best of Staffing firms, earned only by a handful of elite organizations that have won the Best of Staffing designation for 10 consecutive years. Among them are Advantage Resourcing and Staffmark Professional Services, both a part of Staffmark Group, a family of staffing and recruiting brands with over 400 offices across the country.
Both Advantage Resourcing and Staffmark have earned the Best of Staffing designation for Client Satisfaction 10 years in a row. We had the opportunity to sit down with Wendy Reiner, VP of Operations at Staffmark Group, to hear her thoughts on the Best of Staffing program and what the 10 Year Diamond Award means to the Staffmark Group teams.
Wendy Reiner, VP of Operational Processes, Staffmark Group
What does winning the Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award for Client Satisfaction meant to you and the Staffmark team?
Wendy: We’re very proud of this accomplishment! Winning the 10 Year Diamond award is really a testament to the amazing team that we have who, day in and day out, does their very best to support and serve both our clients and our talent. And we really wouldn’t be here without their efforts, especially during what has proven to be some challenging years as of late. And for me it’s really a differentiator in a very competitive marketplace, and it truly validates our organization’s commitment to service excellence. That’s something that we strive for, day in and day out, here at Staffmark Group.
Earning the Best of Staffing 10 Year Diamond Award means that Staffmark has earned exceptional client satisfaction ratings for 10 consecutive years. What does it take to maintain such a high level of excellence for such a long time?
Wendy: That’s a great question. It takes a lot of perseverance and a willingness to really listen and learn and to grow and to adapt to change. You know, we take the feedback gained from our survey results to really look inward: what are we doing well, what can we do better, and what just isn’t working. And I think we always ask ourselves that question of, “What can we do differently to enhance our service levels?” And using our NPS feedback we really challenge our organization to improve – whether it be through operational efficiencies, maybe it’s new technology, internal training, or sometimes just a minor tweak in how we approach doing business. But I think all of those things combined really help us to be a leading staffing company in our industry and we’re really proud of that.
What’s an important lesson that you’ve learned from participating in Best of Staffing for so many years?
Wendy: The big one, for us, is plan, plan, plan. It’s so important to plan for your surveys – in advance of the survey, we are also looking at what’s going on during the survey, and then post-survey. We really do our best to ensure that our clients and talent understand the importance of the surveys and how we’re going to utilize their feedback to improve our service levels, and I think that’s really key.
Have you encountered any surprises along the way in the past 10 years? Did anything happen with the Best of Staffing program that you didn’t expect?
Wendy: Well, I would say good surprises, I mean I love reading the shout outs and the testimonials and I think sometimes, you know, we’re not always necessarily sure what we’re going to get back, right? But I’m just so appreciative of the extra time that our clients and our talent take to praise our teams that stand out. It’s really rewarding when you have an opportunity to read through those and, more so, to share them with our team.
What advice would you give to someone about to participate in Best of Staffing for the first time?
Wendy: I’d say go for it! And really, I think, be sure to follow up on the feedback that you received. Sometimes that might just be to thank someone for taking the time to complete the survey, and kind words. And sometimes it might mean building an action plan with your client as to how you can improve based on the feedback that they offered. It’s just really important to make sure that those that responded hear back from you and know that you heard them, that you reviewed their feedback, and that it is important to you as a company.
Do you have any exciting plans for showing off your award?
Wendy: We do – we will be announcing this in February via a company-wide call so that’s pretty exciting for us. And of course we will be using social media and other mediums to get the word out there as well. I think you know what’s really interesting for us, and we try to do this every year with Best of Staffing, but the 10 Year Diamond Award really allows us to tell a story to both our clients and our talent about who we are and, more importantly, how committed to excellence we are. And we’re excited to share that story.
Is there anything we haven’t covered that you’d like to share or talk about?
Wendy: It’s easy to get caught up in the detractors scores received from a survey and the responses. And while those are so important, and they definitely require action, just don’t lose sight of all the positive feedback received. We have to remind ourselves of that sometimes, you know, be sure to celebrate those Shout Outs and Testimonials and utilize them to give accolades to our team. And I just think that’s a really important component of the survey that sometimes we neglect because we’re so focused on on the Detractor component. It’s just really easy to see that you might get 10 positive feedback scores and then one negative, and then you focus only on the negative. You really have to stop and say, “Hey, let’s look at the whole picture here.” Definitely our detractors give us a lot of value, and we utilize that feedback to make process improvements (and we’ve made a lot throughout the years)! But I think that Promoter feedback just goes such a long way in patting someone on the back. Our teams are out there just working so hard, and what they need to hear sometimes is, “Way to go! Great job on that fill,” and it goes a long way. I always encourage people to focus on the positive, because there’s a lot of good stuff that comes from the feedback in our survey results.
