Best Places to Work 2011: Attention to Employees Key to Success

One of the things that has come up time and again in insideARM.com’s profiles of the winners of 2011′s Best Places to Work — sponsored by Kaulkin Ginsberg — is the importance of employees to the success of an organization.

That certainly was the sense we got from talking to Scott Koenig, president at this year’s first-place winner of the Small Business category, KeyBridge Medical Revenue Management. “Employees are definitely first,” he said. “We put a lot of energy into the hiring process.”

insideARM.com’s Best Places to Work program is a survey of employees — so it’s not surprising that a company that puts its employees first is going to see the kinds of successes KeyBridge has.

“We went through a period with some high turnover,” Koenig explained, “before we started adopting these newer kinds of employee-focused initiatives and developing a different kind of corporate culture. Since we’ve started paying attention to employee feedback and being more proactive in grooming our employees for success, our turnover is now in the single digits.”

Feedback from programs like insideARM.com’s Best Places to Work has also been helpful. “That kind of information is very important to us as a company,” Koenig said. “We weren’t surprised that our employees thought highly of us. We were pleasantly surprised to learn that we had placed first again.”

KeyBridge, with nearly 50 employees, had been the first place Small Business in 2009, but took a year off in 2010. Back now in 2011, the company took top-honors for its category. KeyBridge has been around since 1981, when it was known as General Audit Corp. and was a full-service collection agency. In the 1990s, however, the company decided to focus solely on medical debt — a category of debt that they seemed to have a particular skill with.

KeyBridge looks forward to participating in Best Places to Work next year — with high hopes of another first-place finish.

To see all of this year’s honorees, please visit Best Places to Work in Collections 2011.