The 2022 Best Firms to Work For: Pariveda Solutions

Client Industries Served: Manufacturing, Retail, Financial Services, Automotive, Utilities, Health Care, Life Sciences, Transportation, Wholesale Trade, Energy, Arts, Media & Entertainment, Social Impact, Education

Consulting Service Lines: Business and technology consulting

CMAG: How would you say you've managed to stay among the industry's Best Firms to Work For amid these unprecedented times?

Our purpose, mission, and values increasingly resonate with current generations of business leaders and have even greater appeal with younger generations now entering the workforce. We cannot change where and who we have been. We remain dedicated to growing individuals and collectives toward their fullest potential. We can choose who we will be in the future while remaining true to ourselves and our why, individually and collectively. We aspire to differentiate ourselves across more services with our capability to help customers reframe their ambiguous, complex needs.

CMAG: Were there any specific programs or initiatives (internal or external) that contributed to you being a Best Firm to Work For?

We launched a firm-wide initiative called the Future of Work to explore possibilities moving forward. The Future of Work is a broad effort focused on our entire system of work and its evolution over time. Not just where we work, but why we work, how we work, whom we work with and for, when we work and what we work on. We consider the whole system and recognize its highly interconnected parts. One aspect of our approach is considering fundamental human needs that must be addressed, respecting how change and innovation spread person-to-person, and adopting an inside/out mindset with our people at the center. For our people and customers to thrive, our firm must thrive.

CMAG: What's unique about your firm? What sets it apart?

Meeting human needs to achieve human purpose is the path to sustainability and generating value. We have been very successful in embracing a distinctive, intentionally designed business model centered on individual and collective talent development, lifetime relationships, and business. Traditionally, businesses consume people as resources to satisfy a finite, transactional worldview assuming low levels of trust and sustainability. Instead, we created an enterprise based on designs in nature at human-scale, as an integral part of nature. Helping people (employees, clients, and citizens individually, plus our firm, customers, and communities collectively) aspire and progress toward their highest potential.

CMAG: What's the top priority over the next 6 to 12 months?

We prioritize our people above all, and our customers over our firm as the path to win-win-win. The events of the last 2+ years have reinforced the importance of adaptability and resilience, collectively and individually. Resiliency is a practice, not a state of being, as it trains our attention and awareness in a constantly changing world. Our opportunity as individuals is to deepen our own personal practice of resiliency, tuning into the experiences and relationships that have shaped us to adapt in a volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous (VUCA) world. To help support our people on their journey to practice personal resilience, we developed and released a Resiliency Toolkit of curated resources and tools to support our people. This toolkit is a living resource complementary to firm-wide initiatives and local efforts. Practicing being a resilient firm is a process of creating and nurturing small teams at customers that practice resiliency, with one of the key inputs being the resiliency of individuals on teams.

CMAG: When you look at the remainder of this year and 2023, what excites you? What opportunities do you see in your future?

Our global re-emergence from the pandemic. Pariveda's model sits at the forefront of a human revolution in business, following the agricultural and industrial revolutions. A principle at the core of our model is the power of human connectivity and its dependence on physical locality for the development of deep relationships. At Pariveda, we go beyond just trusting each other to do our jobs – we develop mutual trust in our commitment to our shared purpose and mission. We can again strengthen those bonds of trust through experiences of being present together in person with physical connectedness. We have seen first-hand over the last few years the impact of disconnected people growing apart, even polarizing at national and global levels with declining mental health and personal well-being. As humans and as organizations, we need to embrace the increased complexity necessary to succeed in a volatile future. As we aspire to set the standard for knowledge work in a post-pandemic, we work together as a firm to design and co-create a hybrid work experience with our clients that best supports our mission of developing people toward their fullest individual and collective potentials.

CMAG: What impact do you think being a Best Firm to Work For has on the firm? Employees? Clients?

Our business is founded on the idea of aligning our purpose of developing each of our team members with that of our clients, helping both achieve sustainable successful outcomes. We recruit naturally curious problem solvers who challenge convention and look beyond the problem at hand to address the larger picture. The result is a company of highly skilled, highly motivated strategic technology and business advisors helping our clients achieve success. We strive to not only deliver the best possible outcomes from our work together but to help our clients with their own professional goals. Being an employee-owned company frees us to be truly vested in working towards our clients' long-term, sustainable successes. We do not have sales quotas or commissions, leaving our strategists free to listen carefully for the problems our clients deal with and deliver effective solutions tailored to their needs.

CMAG: Thank you, and congratulations.