It was Richard Branson who first said that the secret to business success wasn’t to take care of customers, but to take care of employees. A truthful statement that some business owners unfortunately, don’t take into consideration.

Emerge began as a digital product agency in Portland in the late 90s and we didn’t last this long by sacrificing our team on the altar of ‘the customer is always right’. These are the people on the ground, and if something isn’t working on the surface level of operations, chances are they’re the best people to talk with to get to the bottom of it.

We were able to test this in a couple of our most recent collaborations which centered on the influence that internal teams have on the overall health of any business.

Our first partner is a sustainable woods company who wanted to streamline their operations but didn’t know where to start. We immediately began investigating the basic workflow of their everyday operations to try and identify where things can improve.

The second project was a web design for a nonprofit organization. These companies are often made up of people who are there for their passion in their advocacy. This means there is a lot of emotional investment tied up in such a design project as each person has their own idea of what needs to be represented the most.

The strategy for both was clear – talk to the employees. For the streamlining project, the people on the ground who actually go through the workflow everyday have a list of pain points that they want the company to address. With the design work, it was important to get everyone’s input on what they think is important for the organization to have.

Clear and open communication across all levels of an organization is essential in solving problems like these. It was our job, not just to design the products that will help these companies, but to draw out honest and constructive feedback from the most important people in those companies.

For those efforts we were rewarded with a solid pair of five-star Clutch reviews from both companies.

These reviews pushed us to #1 on Clutch’s Top UX Agencies. Clutch is a business data aggregation platform that allows users to search through company listings to find a partner for an upcoming project. Since you’re here already why not skip that step and partner with us. Just contact us and we start giving your company the five-star experience you deserve.