While it’s easy to reflect back on 2008 and smile at all the great accomplishments we achieved, it was a year that was not without its challenges. The company faced a series of events and situations that seriously elevated people’s stress levels and made the year’s demands more difficult than ever.

It started early in the year as we quickly saw the building morph into a state of construction chaos. Every floor had building crews engaged in a re-design to expand the necessary workspace to accommodate our fast growing community. From mid-February right through late September, employees had to deal with the constant sounds and disruptions of jarring jackhammers, vibrating concrete drills and screeching metal saws which resonated throughout the building. In addition, we had more than half of our community displaced throughout the building in temporary seating locations. Many of our folks lacked the basic tools and equipment essential to their jobs. Despite the facility challenges, people maintained an amazing sense of humor and weathered the constant interruptions and disruption in a cavalier way.

In parallel with our build-out project, was an accelerated process of hiring over 30 new people into the organization. This was a 41% increase in our community’s size and placed a huge strain on the support functions like IT, HR and Facilities to equip and orient all of these new folks into the business. A large burden was placed on everyone to ante up additional effort, time and resources to help get these people successfully on board so they could begin to contribute to the respective teams and departments.

During a time of great unrest in the business world, the problems we were facing were good problems to have. However, they were still problems and they were having an impact on people every day and needed to be resolved! So much opportunity and our own sense of wanting to capitalize on everything we could, led us to an imbalance in people’s work and personal lives. Much was asked of each and every person often times forcing people to routinely make personal sacrifices as a way of doing business. In retrospect, the work environment that surfaced was in conflict with our values and intentions to create an inspirational work place.

2008 was in many ways a testament to the professionalism, dedication and loyalty of the members of our community and this is what saw us through a challenging and demanding year. As we weathered the challenges and reflect back on the year, we are all proud of what we achieved, wiser for what we have experienced, and more committed than ever to restoring people’s work life balance and ensuring we are able to provide the kind of workplace people rely on as a place of inspiration.