The most important value of our company culture is transparency. Our CEO and finance manager offer an all-company finance update to the entire team each quarter, and prior to this meeting, employees can submit questions to be addressed during this meeting. The past year has been challenging for everyone, and we supported our employees through it by offering flexible work hours, free virtual workouts, a stipend each month, and an additional child care stipend for employees with children.

Our company is built on culture. Our CEO, DeLinda Forsythe, founded Innovative Commercial Environments to be an empowered and safe work environment for women. Since then, we have continued to develop a culture of kindness and respect that encourages entrepreneurialism and boundary pushing. In 2017, we hired an outside firm to help us formalize and improve employee engagement. Out of this process arose an employee-led culture committee and a greater commitment to our employees. Despite a sudden drop in furniture demand, we weathered 2020 without single layoff.

Our managers are coaches who are generous with time, encouragement, and feedback. It's better to fail and learn than to strive for perfection. We provide great flexibility, judging performance by results rather than work hours. We aspire to make diversity more than just a mandate, and our biweekly "family meeting" brings employees together to celebrate accomplishments, promotions, and new hires as a team. From our generous benefits to our well-being guides, paid mental health days, and monthly themes and challenges, we ensure employees prioritize their well-being.

We could not deliver the volume and quality of work that we do without an amazing culture. We have an open culture where people are comfortable asking for different work hours, role transitions, and new challenges. During the pandemic, classroom training was deeply affected, and much of our business was postponed or canceled. As we became a virtual organization, we stepped up to maintain our culture with new activities. We held reflections and asked everyone to focus not on the missed objectives but on the list of new skills and experiences they helped to create in 2020.

Our culture and employees are our greatest competitive advantages. We hire top performers who exhibit a mix of values, leadership, complex professional skills, knowledge, and experience. Our robust employee development programs keeps our high-achieving employees continually challenged and offers opportunities for advancement. Our diligent fiscal management has allowed us to distribute company performance bonuses to every employee for more than 10 years.