why i stay (and joined) - culture, opportunity, responsibility - Anonymous employee CrossCountry Consulting Employee Review

I have been with CrossCountry for four years now. In a recent interview, I was asked why I joined and why am I still here. The answer has not changed. 1 -Company Culture We have four key values that are the makeup of our company, Impact, Energy, Excellence and Collaboration. Those are four words that could appear on any company's core value list. What makes CrossCountry different is the practical application of these values on a daily basis by all of my colleagues. A few examples: a) in our weekly leadership meeting, we typically spend 30 minutes out of the hour talking only about our people. This allows us to make sure we are attuned to what is happening within our organization and can celebrate our collective successes or rally to each others cause. b) we have a roll up your sleeves attitude where everyone pitches in regardless of “Level”. For example, I was working on a system implementation for a client. We were having significant issues converting their financial accounting data. I called in our founding partner, who is an expert, to ask a few questions. After 30 minutes on the phone, he said “I am coming to you”. He flew across the country and spent the next three weeks with us every night helping to solve the problem. Those are just two simple examples, but they do demonstrate how we bring meaning to those four words. 2 – Opportunity We are still a growing firm. The company has doubled in size in my duration, however, it has kept its entrepreneurial experience. The opportunity to come in and be part of a build is very intriguing to me to this day and hopefully you. If you want to help participate in strategy, practice management, marketing, business development, people development, or client delivery – this is the place for you. We continue to evolve and take on new service offerings – this creates a continual loop of opportunity for you. Given the wide range of services we offer, which are in various states of maturity, you can come in and lend your ideas in any number of ways and help see them through to completion. We strongly believe in progress not perfection. The opportunity to continually make us a little better each day is out there if that intrigues you. 3 – Responsibility We have titles like any other firm. Titles are important in the sense that it allows you to measure yourself and advance your career as you learn new skills and competencies. However, in our day to day work environment, titles are somewhat irrelevant. Whether you are working on client facing work or internal initiatives, you have the opportunity to lead. By sampling raising your hand or better yet taking the initiative, you can lead teams and help us to improve. I personally tell my colleagues that if you see something I am doing that you want to do – just let me know. One colleague just called me yesterday and said he wanted to lead a PMO for a big internal initiative. It was his passion and something that he felt that he could do well. I gladly transferred this responsibility to him and he is running the program better than me. The other big difference about CrossCountry is that we can go from idea to action in a very short amount of time. There is very little bureaucracy. Another set of colleagues had just assisted a client with system testing their new application. They were tracking test cases in excel and using e-mail to communication issues. This led to little visibility on the overall progress of the test cycle and lots of frustration and extra work. They brought this problem forward and brainstormed on how we could use existing tools to help make this process better. In two days, we had a working prototype up and the new test management tool is a hit with clients and our team. They saw a problem, came up with an idea and quickly put it into action. If this entices you, Crosscountry is a great fit.