The Minnesota Star Tribune’s Top Workplaces award program, which is based on the belief that “the most successful companies are the ones that employees believe in”, began in 2006 and is determined by WorkplaceDynamics LLC, a survey company out of Exton, PA. The Top Workplaces program assembles the list of award recipients based on employee’s opinions of their employers, gathered through a WorkplaceDynamics survey, which is distributed company-wide to all employees of the companies that apply.

Survey creators have learned since beginning of the survey program that there are three things that drive the long term health of a company: a clear direction for the company’s future, a culture of high performance and a strong connection between employees and the company. Bottom line, inspiration trumps other factors such as career, pay and management.

CEO of WorkplaceDynamics Doug Claffey agrees.

“You cannot pay more money to get someone to remain engaged in a bad workplace,” Claffey said to the Star Tribune. “Fundamentally, most people are not going to get excited to make more money. They get excited about doing something meaningful with people they believe in and enjoy working with.”

Over 300 other Minnesota companies applied for this year’s Top Workplaces award. Congratulations to all of the other companies that made the list!

When we arrived at Feed My Starving Children, we were asked to sign in and to put our hair nets on. Then, we got seated in a long, narrow room with the other volunteers, where the volunteer coordinator showed us a short video and gave a brief presentation about the organization, and who and where it serves. We were introduced to the other volunteer groups, most of which were families or employees from other local companies. Then, we headed to the back room to get to work!

Before getting started, we were told what we’d be doing: our duty was to hand-pack meals in MannaPack bags, which would contain four main ingredients: rice, textured soy protein, dried vegetable and seasoned vitamins and minerals. The coordinator had explained that the ingredients are chosen because they are formula-rich foods that stay in the system and provide unique, specific health results.

There were various steps to the process, from labeling bags, to filling them, to sealing them or and travelling to and from the warehouse to ensure that everyone’s pans of ingredients remained full. We worked filled bags and boxed them for close to an hour and a half, then filed back into the main room.

The coordinator told us that just one cup of the mixture we’d compiled would provide enough energy for a starving child for one day, and that each meal provided by Feed My Starving Children costs only 22 cents to produce. With 43 of us packing, we filled 71 boxes and provided 15,336 meals, enough food to feed 42 kids for a whole year!

“Thank you for coming out today,” the volunteer coordinator said at the end of our packing session. “You are the hearts and souls of Feed My Starving Children.”

It was a rewarding feeling to volunteer for such a good cause and that afternoon, it truly felt like we were making a difference!

Avionté is a firm believer that our most important asset is our customers and we are looking for dedicated staffing industry professionals that can relate to them with their everyday business needs.

Customer Care Department Responsibilities/Specializations:

The customer care team has many facets and variety allowing individual team members to focus in specific areas:

• Customer Care/Account Management: you will be in charge of managing customer relationships with our clients that utilize our proprietary software. From providing regular check-in calls to assisting with development requests or customizations, you will be their main point of contact.
• External & Internal Training: this position requires the aptitude to learn a comprehensive staffing software inside and out. This department provides training on work flow, processes, new functionality, etc. to internal employees as well as external customers. Training for external clients will require travel across the US and Canada, up to 25%.
• QA: as we are constantly developing and improving the software, new functionality is always being added or changed. This position will assist in supporting QA initiatives.
• Documentation: Updating and maintaining documentation for the software.
• 3rd Party Integrations: We integrate and partner with many other staffing industry vendors, this position will be responsible for consulting on and identifying integrations to bring further efficiencies to our clients.

Skills/Qualifications:

• Staffing Industry experience, min 2+ years (this is a mandatory requirement for the position)
• Extremely detailed oriented and very organized
• Great multi-tasking and follow-up
• Ability to work and thrive in a fast paced environment
• Bring an enthusiastic energy, drive to create lasting relationships with clients
• Technical aptitude and motivation to learn a comprehensive software program
• Bachelor’s degree
• Previous account management experience a bonus but not required
• Excellent customer service skills, written and verbal communication skills

Perks:

• Work for a high growth, energetic organization
• Competitive benefits including retirement plan, company paid health insurance and profit sharing
• Work with others that share your drive and commitment for excellence
• A career with extreme advancement opportunities that will take you as far as you want to go!

Avionté is based in Eagan, Minnesota. While there are other offices nationwide, the candidate must work from the Eagan, MN office. This position is not ideal for timid, measured, slow thinking, coasting individuals. This position is hard, fast and intense but also very rewarding.

Apply now

Last year, 11 employees participated in the Warrior Dash challenge, a vertical, 5k mud and obstacles challenge, held at the Afton Alps in South Hastings, MN. Last year, fundraising for the event, which supports the the St. Jude Children’s Hospital, was a very rewarding experience for us, but the Dash itself was quite the challenge!

Although last year’s Warrior Dash  was difficult, raising money for St. Jude made it worth it. Last year, we raised a total of $2,500 for the St. Jude Children’s Hospital and we  are hoping to raise even more than that this year. We’ve got internal fundraisers planned for Fridays in the entire month of June through the Avionte Hope Foundation. In addition to fundraisers, we’re also collecting donations through our fundraising page. We greatly appreciate any support you can offer!

Stay tuned! We’ll be sure to keep you all updated on our fundraising efforts with more blog posts, photos, etc.!

Avionte employees at the 2012 Warrior Dash.

Here are some fun photos from last year’s event:

We had some fun challenges set up at our hole!

We wanted to add some unique activities to the course!

We had a lot of fun sponsoring the event last year.

We even broke the tee!

Looking forward to seeing friends again this year!

We will be sponsoring a hole again this year and we hope to run into you on the green!!

Earlier this week, a tornado struck Oklahoma City and its surrounding suburbs. The tornado killed 24 people and is now being referred to as one of the most devastating tornados in U.S. history. While residents were warned that a tornado was on its way, it was just hours before it hit that metiorologists were able to predict just how detrimental the tornados could potentially be.

These types of natural disasters remind us of how important it is to be adequately prepared for what could go wrong, in all scenarios – so that we are able to recover in quicker and more effective ways. As a society, we still can’t see all that’s coming, but I argue that we are far more prepared today for what’s to come than we were yesterday. And we’ve definitely come a long way.

Although they are rare, disasters can occur throughout all industries, including the software industry. This is why it is important that all software companies work continuously to ensure that they are not only providing a disaster-free product, but are also prepared to react to whatever could occur.

At Avionté, development initiatives and various testing scenarios are a significant part of the daily responsibilities of many of our employees. We work hard to ensure that a software disaster scenario will never occur with our product. We have a great team of developers and support specialists here that are dedicated to our product and to our customers. Our development team is continuously churning out new releases and our support team is available to our customers around-the-clock, to work through any support issues they may be experiencing.

Keeping our staffing and recruiting customers satisfied with our product has always been Avionté’s main goal.  We work hard every day to ensure that our software not only meets customer expectations, but far exceeds them. Afterall, our clients are what make what we do everyday valuable and worthwhile. And although no company or product is perfect, we know we’ve got something special here.

Customer Care Rep Rod Barsness posing with employees from Employee Solutions.

Avionte employees pose with clients at 2012′s Client Connection Forum.

We love our employees and customers! Posing here at Client Connection, 2012.

It was our second year attending the World Employment Conference, put on by the Association of Canadian Search Employment and Staffing Services (ACSESS) in conjunction with the International Confederation of Private Employment Agencies (CIETT).

Somewhere the conference gods were smiling down on us; we had amazing weather and a beautiful location! Our venue sat right in the middle of Lake Ontario and downtown Toronto. The views from the conference center made sitting at our booth for any amount of time quite easy. To those of you who work hard to plan the conference venue and make sure the accommodations are just right, thank you!

For anyone who has exhibited in a trade show or conference, you know that often times it can feel like the same routine, with different scenery. It really doesn’t feel like that long ago that Jason and I were setting up the same booth at the TempNet conference in Palm Desert.

Most conferences have the exhibitors come in the morning of to set up, but due to tight time constraints our set up was scheduled for 7:30 p.m. For those of you who don’t travel much for work, it may seem glamorous and exciting to be able to travel to so many different locations. The reality is, when you travel for these types of conferences, you mostly see the airport, the venue and your hotel room.  As luck would have it, on the day we arrived, the BlueJays were hosting the San Francisco Giants only blocks away. Better yet, cheap seats were still available! So Jason and I wasted no time in getting our booth up and prepped for the next day. With the booth ready to go we took a stroll to the ballpark, complete with hotdogs and Cokes.

Most conferences offer a breakfast for exhibitors. Simply stated, all the exhibitors were at their booths and breakfast was served in a location close by. We were fortunate to have several of our Canadian clients and a few of our American clients at the conference. It makes the early morning rise much better when you get to spend time with people you enjoy.

Our booth is big and bright (thanks to Brenda!) and cannot be easily missed. Curious attendees don’t have to wonder what we do; they can easily see it! Traffic flowed well for most of the morning and kept Jason and I busy answering questions and chatting with people we’d met at last year’s conference.

Lunchtime quickly rolled around. We enjoyed a beautiful day on the patio overlooking the lake and joked about some confusion between CA (Canada) and CA (California) (Jason attended both the ACSESS conference and the CSP conference last week). At the time, it was warmer in Toronto than it was in Los Angeles. But that wouldn’t be the only bit of confusion that we had between CA and CA during the conference…

I told Jason that I needed some good material for my blog post, and that thus far is was pretty ordinary.  One must be careful what they wish for! That evening, I took Jason to his hotel to catch an early morning flight to Los Angeles for the CSP conference and drove back through rush hour traffic, uneventfully. I had a late night dinner scheduled at the restaurant at the top of the hotel. It was similar to the Space Needle or other towers that had a rotating dining room to show off the view. I was a little surprised when I stepped out of the elevator to find that is was stationary. Since our dinner was scheduled a little later in the evening, the restaurant wasn’t very busy, allowing me to select where I wanted to sit. Out the window, just across the bay, sat the Billy Bishop Toronto Airport. All the small regional jets land on this island landing strip. With the sun setting and the water sparkling, it was nice to just watch the planes land and take off for a few minutes.

My dinner companions were delightful, the food was wonderful and the scenery was beautiful. As I reached for something on the table I felt my phone drop. This happens to me a lot, hence the soft cover I now have on it to keep it from breaking. Thinking nothing of it, I bent over to realize my phone was not there. It’s not as if it could bounce that far, right? Laughing it off, I got up and started looking for my phone. That’s when I realized that when the restaurant does move, it needs a track to do so. That track was right beside my set, and it wasn’t a shallow reach.

Slightly embarrassed, I called the waiter over and asked if they had a flashlight, as I needed to confirm where my phone was. I certainly knew where it wasn’t. Looking down about a foot, there sat my phone… just out of reach. This must happen pretty frequently, because soon after, another waiter appeared with a long set of tongs to expertly retrieve my phone. Needless to say it went in my pocket for the rest of the night. And… I had my story.

Lucky for me, the rest of the trip was uneventful. Jason made it safely to Los Angeles while I broke down the booth and headed to the airport. It’s always a pleasure to see our friends from past conferences and meet new ones. We look forward to a continuing our relationship with ACSESS and its members.

After returning from Chicago, where our VP of Sales Mike Scoville attended the Midwest Staffing Conference on May 1^st, Mike flew out with our Chief Software Architect Samar Basnet to May’s two-day ASG event. The conference was held in Chicago from May 8^th to May 10^th. Samar started Wednesday’s series of presentations off with his presentation on Affordable Care Act tracking and Avionté Best Practices. On May 14^th, Mike was out of the office again, networking at the NYSA’s Super Seminar Day event.

The ASG conference featured a series of presentations regarding technology & The Affordable Care Act.

Last week, our CEO John Long and Director of Operations Laura Schmitz attended the Staffing Law Conference in Chicago, which was put on by ASA and took place from May 8^th to May 9^th. Laura said it was an informative event that provided some fresh news. To learn about Avionté’s progress in adapting our software to the ACA, email aca@avionte.com.

Our VP of Sales Jason Ortner and Director of Staffing Technology Angela Pitts have spent most of the week in Toronto at the World Employment Conference, hosted by the Association of Canadian Search Employment and Staffing Services. Jason flew out earlier this morning to join Brenda Long, our Director of Marketing, and our Customer Care Rep Sarah Freitag at the California Staffing Professionals Conference. Angela’s packing up the booth and heading home later tonight. We hope you came by to say hi if you were also there!

Avionte, all set for the World Employment Conference in Toronto.

Customer Care Rep Sarah Freitag, at the CSP Conference.

As you can tell, our sales team has been busy! We’ve enjoyed being able to be a part of so many of these events and networking with old and new friends.

Counters are Cool

Who Changed That?

Match ‘em Up Automatch

Paycheck Voids/Reversals

Save Time – Shortcuts

Generating Resumes

Do You Document?

Forgotten Timecards

I’ve Got Skills

Sometimes Basic is Best

Search Options

Too Many Tabs

Favorites v2010

Keeping Track of Candidates

Start Sheets

Do You Inspect?

Ending Assignments

Tracking Sources

Quarter End Reports

Look What I Can See

My Favorite Child

Assignment Changes

Data Requirement Message

Mass Resume Parser

QuickPlace

Mass Mail

More Than a Message

Mass Mail

New Back Office Features

Search Options in Advanced Search

New Back Office Features

Adding Transactions to Orders

Agency

New Resume Parser Feature

Web Time Entry

Employer Health Reporting

Contacts

User Security

Data Requirement Message

Using Quick Place to Track Orders

I Love Skill Marketing

User Security

Contacts

Back Office Corrections

A Little “Extra” Tracking

Advance Search

Favorites and Mass Mail

Text Messaging

Users

Easy Labels

Candidate vs. Candidates

Counters are Cool Part 2

Do You See What I See?

Two AQ’s for You

Clean Up Time

Do More in Less Time

 EEO/Affirmative Action

Why Worksite?

A Few of My Favorites

Filling an Assignment 101

Do you have an idea for the Tip of the Week?  Send me an email.