Nextiva Recognized as one of Arizona's Most Admired Companies for 2015

Nextiva recently announced that it had received one of the 2015 Arizona’s Most Admired Companies awards, which are given out by BestCompaniesAZ. Multiple companies can receive the award, which is based on feedback from the surrounding community, customers, and employees.

Nextiva is a privately held company headquartered in Scottsdale that provides unified cloud-based business communications. It also offers PBX/SIP trunking, business phone service, and call center solutions.

BestCompaniesAZ, LLC is an organizational marketing and consulting firm based in Mesa, and founded in 2002 by Denise Gredler. One of its tasks is to look for the best workplaces in Arizona and the rest of the U.S. It gives out several awards like Top Companies in Arizona, 100 Best Arizona Companies, and Arizona’s Most Admired Companies (AMAC).

Multiple companies can receive an AMAC award, which fall under Winners and Spotlight Winners categories. Spotlight Winners are given to a company for strength in one of five specific areas: leadership excellence, workplace culture, social responsibility, innovation, and customer opinion. The regular Winners category for 2015 is made up of 40 companies that performed well based on a combination of all the aforementioned criteria.

Nextiva joins several prominent companies and organizations winning 2015 AMAC awards that are well-known across the U.S.: the Arizona Diamondbacks baseball club, GoDaddy, Charles Schwab, Infusionsoft, and Vonage to name a few.

Awards by their nature often come with some controversy. They can be overly subjective and appear to be a form of favoritism. A common argument is that companies should be concerned with their bottom line and not necessarily how much everyone else likes them. A positive view of awards sees them as motivation to perform well and set examples for others to follow.

Several sources suggest that companies that treat employees well and are socially responsible often have a great bottom line. Google, for example, offers a generous health plan, college reimbursement, legal aid, and will continue to pay the family 50 percent of a deceased employee’s salary for 10 years.

As USA Today points out, success and employee treatment are like a chicken-and-egg scenario: is the company successful because it treats employees well, or is it able to treat employees well because of previous success? Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics suggest that the former is more likely. Companies in the 2014 Fortune 100 Best Companies to Work For hired at a rate five times greater than the national average while increasing revenues 22.4 percent on average. This is not surprising; employees that are treated well tend to perform well, which ultimately helps the bottom line.

The same does not appear to be true with corporate responsibility (CR). Steve Rochlin, a co-CEO of IO Sustainability who contributed to a study on CR, told Inc. Magazine that CR by itself does not make a company profitable, but can improve an already successful company: “No company ever corporate-responsibilitied itself to success,”  he pointed out.

Organizations like BestCompaniesAZ, which recognize successful businesses and encourage those who make the work environment and the world a better place, contribute to those ends by recognizing businesses that practice them. It serves as proof that being responsible, treating employees well, and being successful need not be mutually exclusive goals. 

Edited by Maurice Nagle