Check out Chattanooga’s Best Places to Work

These 10 businesses persisted, thrived through the pandemic

In surveys of companies and employees for the 2021 Best Places to Work list, the qualities that make a place a great employer don’t change much, despite the pandemic and a year that reinvented work, said Peter Burke, the founder of the Best Companies Group. “The words pivot, reinvent, all became part of the vernacular,” said Burke, whose 23-employee team has gone fully remote. “But being a best place to work isn’t physical. It’s communication, emotional connection, all those intangibles.”

Best Companies Group added questions about remote work and plans to return to the office to its surveys, and many employers are grappling with that transition, Burke said.

“What we’re seeing is that employees want to work at home most or all of the time, but people still want connection, they want to go in and see people, they want that in-person interaction,” Burke said. “Employers have a big decision to make — am I going to hang onto an office building so people can get together once in a while?”

But the future of work isn’t entirely clear, and may look a little more like the best of both worlds.

Most of the companies on this year’s Best Places to Work list have brought a substantial number of employees back to the office with masks and social distancing in place.

Two companies — Steam Logistics and Text Request — are more committed than ever to the office experience, and will expand their real estate footprints as vaccines roll out and their businesses grow.

“I don’t see how you build a company culture over Zoom,” said Text Request co-founder Rob Reagan.

When the lease was recently up on the space Text Request had occupied

on the Southside for the last four years, company leaders opted to move into the heart of downtown and nearly double their space to 7,200 square feet in an office above Jack’s Alley on Market Street.

Nearby, Steam Logistics is grabbing space recently vacated by Austin-based Arrive Logistics, doubling its 11,000-square-foot office on Market Street. Arrive shifted its 19-employee workforce to remote, but Steam is all in to grow and do it in person, CEO Jason Provonsha said.

Frank Butler is a UC Foundation associate professor of management at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, and co-host of the podcast “The Busyness Paradox.” He sees the pandemic as a potential catalyst for rethinking what engagement and productivity look like.

Many New-York based financial services firms are pushing to get people back to work, citing a drop in productivity in homebased workers, he said. But lost productivity may have been as much about the stressors of working in isolation and during a global crisis as it was working from home, he added. “You’re not having your normal outlets to decompress from work that you should,” Butler said.

People with young families, and women in particular, have borne much of the brunt of juggling the work-from-home, school-from-home, no-daycare world, he said. This is the time to address those problems, he said.

“Companies need to ask how they can provide the resources to help women continue to contribute to the success of our business,” Butler said. “The likelihood of us having another pandemic is really high. We’re very global, and that genie isn’t going to go back in the bottle.”