Holmes Murphy & Associates

Holmes Murphy & Associates, the risk management and insurance brokerage firm, has it right there in the company’s central goals: Be an Employer of Choice. To be the best, the thinking goes, they must employ the best. And the Des Moines-based company, which employs 21 at its Overland Park office, starts with a competitive salary structure, a stock-incentive bonus plan for sales producers, and benefits that include 401(k) and profit-sharing programs and year-end bonuses.

The next tier includes health, dental and vision insurance plans, disability insurance (long-term and short term), flexible spending accounts and flexible schedules, life and supplemental life insurance, an employee assistance program, reimbursements for fitness club memberships, and an adoption-assistance program.

The company also has a series of personal and organizational goals, which promote individual achievement as well as corporate success: Count on Me, Celebrate, Share Abundantly, Unity over Uniformity, Health Matters, Courageous Influence, and Leave Good Footprints. Those Holmes Murphy Values, as they’re known, are meant to reinforce individual accountability, strengthen relationships between associates and with clients, improve information flow, foster free exchange of ideas, promote health, think entrepreneurially, and encourage professionalism.

Holmes Murphy also supports non-profit efforts championed by its clients, both with a financial commitment and by encouraging staff members to serve in leadership roles with non-profit and community organizations.

What does all of that amount to, from the employee’s perspective? You can find the answer to that in the company’s annual satisfaction survey. Last year, the Kansas City team:

• Ranked Holmes Murphy highly for operating with strong values and ethics.

• Said they believed in the direction of the company and felt connected to their jobs.

• Agreed that new ideas are encouraged.

• And had the flexibility to balance work and personal lives.

If you score that out, it came to a 90 percent job-satisfaction rate, based on whether they would recommend working at Holmes Murphy to others.

 

Bank of Kansas City

You can’t fake culture, and you can’t mandate camaraderie. When they’re genuine, they are powerful indicators of workplace quality. Example: Bank of Kansas City, where employees not long ago learned that the daughter of a colleague was scheduled for open-heart surgery. They sent a team to Ronald McDonald House to prepare lunch, but not just for that colleague’s family—they expanded that effort by feeding dozens of other families dealing with similar issues. It’s the kind of compassion and commitment to the community, bank officials say, that comes from the heart, not from a corporate directive.

The bank, a division of Oklahoma-based BOK Financial, entered the market in 2006 and has grown to 180 employees in the Kansas City region. Under the direction of CEO Michael Viazzoli, it’s a place where teamwork is prized and ideas flow freely. They have to, officials say—because of the way the bank is structured, with service lines that run from mortgage lending to wealth management for high net-worth clients, cross-selling and partnering with multiple lines of business isn’t merely encouraged, it’s vital to growth.

And the bank has indeed grown. Seven years after its establishment in Kansas City, it boasts $460 million in assets. That growth is one consequence of a measured approach to banking: The parent company, with $28 billion in assets, was the largest commercial bank in the United States to decline funding under the TARP program, spawned by the financial crisis of 2008.

When the Tulsa-based parent decided it was time to operate in Kansas City, it was entering a highly competitive banking market. That made a competitive salary structure an imperative from Day One, but atop that are salary grades and ranges and bonus opportunities, as well as a comprehensive package of insurance coverages (health, dental, vision), flexible spending accounts, and Healthyroads, a personalized wellness program that complements an in-house corporate wellness initiative that provides reduced-cost access to fitness facilities.

As with the Ronald McDonald House lunch service, other charitable ventures like participation in Heart Walk are team-based (the bank’s employees donated more than 2,500 hours of service last year), and the bank has been a United Way Circle of Caring member since 2008.

 

Lansing Trade Group

Let’s lift the curtain—just a wee bit—on how the Best Companies to Work For are determined. One factor, out of many, is the quality of a company’s retirement program—a tangible sign of how much it cares about an employee’s welfare beyond their working years. One differentiator is the size of a company match for an employee’s contributions to, say, a 401(k) plan. And that’s where Lansing Trade Group absolutely shines: The company contributes 5 percent of an employee’s eligible pay to its safe-harbor 401(k). On top of that, the company can elect to add a profit-sharing contribution that historically averages 3 percent of eligible pay. Now we’re at 8 percent of annual eligible pay, and the employee’s contribution so far? Nada. Zippity-doo-dah. “Lansing is an organization that believes in ensuring solid retirement income for our employees, and we make that happen,” says Melinda Lebofsky, Director of Human Resources.

But there’s a lot more than a stellar retirement plan at work here. Based on annual revenues, Lansing Trade Group has grown to become fourth-largest among private companies in the region, dealing in the transportation, storage and merchandising of agricultural and energy commodities through the U.S. and around the world. It got there by valuing entrepreneurship among its nearly 300 employees (about half in the Kansas City region), and that work force applies the spurs for growth, motivated in part by a highly competitive salary and benefits package that rewards employees for superior performance.

Employee focused culture? “Even the small stuff is a big deal at Lansing,” says Lebofsky. Each month wraps up with lunch brought in for all team members, and they still like birthday celebrations. The caloric intake can be worked off either at the on-site fitness center, or through the company’s partnership with local fitness centers in the area.

The company pays 80 percent of health-insurance and dental premiums, provides life and long-term liability insurance, sports a flexible spending account for medical or dependent-care expenses, and offers a tuition reimbursement for both college and grad-school courses.

“We do things differently,” Lebofsky says, “and we are very proud of that.”