Impact Advisors: Medium-size suppliers

Some of the people who work for Impact Advisors, a technology consultancy that serves hospitals nationwide, may never have seen many of their co-workers in person. They're spread out around the country, and many travel frequently to meet with clients.

But they might know them better because of their pets. That's because, among the many activities the company promotes to help make work fun is its pet supermodel contest. Employees enter pictures of their pets for the competition—so they might know a long-distance co-worker's dog better than the colleague.

“You'll meet someone at the office, and you're like, 'Oh yeah, you're Daisy's mom,' ” said company co-founder and CEO Peter Smith (whose dog Roscoe went with a back-to-school theme, including backpack, for this year's picture).

Impact Advisors is No. 1 among medium-size suppliers on Modern Healthcare's list of the Best Places to Work in Healthcare for 2016 and No. 3 overall.

Making work fun is important to Smith and co-founder and brother Andy Smith, because happy workers treat clients better, and stay at the company longer. The company doesn't make anything, per se, so its product is its work. “The only asset we have is our people,” Peter Smith said. “And we want to attract talent so that we can offer quality services.” So the company has a senior management-level “happyologist,” whose job is to make sure employees are happy, including overseeing pet beauty contests.

Ultimately, though, being happy is about much more, acknowledges Smith—and the company culture is also big on helping employees do good work on serious, rewarding projects. That means helping them grow by providing frequent feedback on improvement, and offering opportunities to advance.

“We want their skills to mature and grow,” Smith said. That's what leads to deeper job satisfaction, he said. “We want to provide good, meaningful work for people. ... Even though we are a tech company, by extension, we are working for the patients that our hospitals serve.”