The 2023 Best Small Firms to Work For: Orium

Client Industries Served: Retail & Commerce

Consulting Service Lines: Strategy, Operations, IT, Product Management, Delivery Management, Technology Vendor Selection, UX & UI Design

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

We've been remote friendly since our inception, so we had a leg-up when moving to remote first. But like everyone, we still had our growing pains. What sets us apart is our dogged commitment to improving. We listen to our team. Every two months we take a pulse survey to get a snapshot of how they're feeling. Once a year, we conduct larger engagement surveys to understand what the team feels as a whole across a wide spectrum of categories. There will always be areas for improvement, but where we excel is in responding to concerns quickly and not just creating plans, but acting on them.

Our employee experience has always set us apart, especially in the hyper competitive talent market of the past few years. Our commitment to holding ourselves accountable to our values and ensuring our team members—no matter where they are in the world—feel respected, appreciated, and heard has been a core part of our growth and operational strategy. It is as simple—and as extremely difficult—as that.

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

We're focused on three areas—employee experience, client satisfaction and operational excellence—and we know if one of those things isn't working, none of them is working as well as it should. As a professional services firm, our team is what clients are paying for. And clients won't get the best results, won't be happy working with us, and won't see the impact they're hoping for if our teams aren't engaged and happy at work. What that means is we take employee experience as seriously as we take things like revenue targets and margin attainment.

Our leadership team meets every two weeks to discuss progress toward strategic objectives, as well as flag any hot topics, and it's in those meeting we find we're best able to manage the balance of our three focus areas. Together, we proactively plan for any upcoming organizational changes, ensuring we have a change management strategy in place and have thought through the impact on the team of decisions we're making. We work hard to ensure major issues don't arise, but in the instances when an issue does come up, our biweekly meetings mean we're able to respond to it quickly and as a team, before it becomes a culture-shifting problem.

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

Our culture is the beating heart of what sets us apart. For over a decade, we've been a B Corp, and have frequently been highlighted as among the top 10% of B Corps in the Best for Workers category. We truly care about our team members and invest in them as people above all else.

One of the under-discussed but significant factors in what makes a place great to work is knowing you'll be given the chance to excel at your job. At Orium, we're laser focused on composable commerce. Lots of the big firms dabble in it, and that's great, but the reality is if you're not immersed in it every day, it's hard to become truly great at it, and to deliver the best outcomes for customers. All people want to feel good at their jobs and empowered to bring their best every day, but when you're being asked to flex across a million different focus areas, it can be really challenging.

The composable commerce space changes really quickly, and being in lock step with leading vendors like commerce tools, Elastic Path and Big Commerce, makes all the difference in delivering on the promise that composable commerce holds. Our team members are working at the leading edge of what this new tech paradigm offers, and are honing their skills even further every day. The core skills they employ on one project transfer directly to the next, and we are routinely updating our training programs and opportunities to ensure team members have access to the most up-to-date resources.

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

We want to be the midsize specialist in composable commerce. We're the known experts in the Americas, and through growth and thought leadership, we aim to maintain this position as the market evolves.

Optimizing our delivery processes is our highest priority and one aspect we're focused on in particular is our workflow and estimation process at Orium. Earlier this year, our Service Methods team (an internal department focused on process alignment) laid out the areas that required change and assembled a team to lead the charge. As a result, we've started implementing an action plan that includes better routines, defined processes and role clarity.

Investing in employee development and upskilling. We have an internal department called Craft Development, whose mission is to curate, define, and share Orium's practices to help accelerate the growth of employees. Learning is provided in various formats, including in-depth playbooks and live facilitated sessions. Some focus areas over the next 6-12 months are upskilling our team on their customer-facing skills, providing role clarity and training resources for our delivery team members (so they know what they need to do to be successful in their roles) and equipping our people leaders with the training, tools and resources they need to lead effectively.

CMAG: When you look at the remainder of this year and 2024, what excites you? What opportunities do you see in your markets?

Composable commerce is a rapidly growing sector. Pre-pandemic we saw this change coming, on the horizon, and we began shifting our focus to it. When the pandemic hit, it sped up not only our transition, but the entire retail and commerce sector's transition to this technology approach. We were lucky (and smart, we'll say it!) to see the wave coming before it crashed on shore, because it gave us time to prepare our business and our teams for a new way of working. North America has been the fastest growing sector, and our business has doubled in the past 18 months and all credit goes to our incredible team for trusting the vision, doubling down on building the right skills, and continuing to do the incredible work they do every day.

As the movement to composable continues, we're working to build out the knowledge and resources for brands to succeed. We're the title sponsor for Composable.com, the premiere destination for news and information about composable commerce, and we're partnering with a services firm in Mexico to support international growth of the sector in LATAM, working with them to create a center of excellence to shore up the skills and knowledge of composable in new markets.

We've been working at the forefront of this movement for several years and it's all we do, so to see the movement take hold like this is thrilling. We know what can come of a meaningful shift to a MACH-based architecture. We know what these brands can make happen when they transform their technical approach and how that spills over into operational transformation and ultimately, whole business impact in a really incredible way. Our team feels it, and works hard to keep the momentum up.

It really does feel like that moment when you see a wave coming, and you've been paddling hard to catch it, and now we're standing up on the surfboard and it's just going to be a beauty of a ride.

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

There are two answers to this: internal and external. Internally, it's extremely validating. Being recognized in this way reaffirms what we have always believed about ourselves: that we have created an environment where individuals can be themselves and create their own paths to success. Refining our values with whole team input, establishing and expanding our Craft Development program to support the ongoing skills development and training of our team members in an always-changing tech space, running regular surveys to identify hot spots in employee experience, and finding new ways to celebrate and connect as a team as we've transitioned to fully remote operations… each of these things (and so many more) are things we believed would make a difference to the experience of being an Orian. Receiving an honor like this is part of what lets us know we're on the right track.

And then externally it offers a point of reassurance. Clients increasingly care about what kind of people they're going into business with, and this provides a proof point from a reputable third party, which does make a difference for them. Great businesses do their due diligence, and a single accolade would never make or break their view, but this kind of recognition reinforces and fills in the full picture of who we are. Clients see markers like this and know they can trust that we're the kind of business we say we are, that we'll be good to work with. The projects we work have us working closely with their teams, working shoulder to shoulder for months and months. How our employees feel and what our employee experience is really does matter. And frankly, happier, more fulfilled employees do better work. They're more invested, they care more about outcomes. Knowing our team members like their jobs, that they'll stick around and produce the work we've promised is an important factor when you're choosing one firm over another. It's a win for everyone.