Publication: St. Louis Business Journal, May 16, 2024

The St. Louis Business Journal’s annual Best Places to Work Awards, which recognizes the top workplaces in the St. Louis region, is one of the most anticipated awards programs of the year. I receive dozens of phone calls and emails throughout the year from companies and executives inquiring about the nomination process and how they can get their organizations recognized.

For the 2024 program, we received nearly 200 nominations, and after those nominees were surveyed by Omaha, Nebraska-based Quantum Workplace, we named 83 finalists in five size categories: small (10-49 employees), medium (50-99 employees), large (100-249 employees), big (250-999 employees) and giant (1,000-plus employees.) Additional honors were given to companies for achievements in community involvement and young professionals.

Keep reading below to learn more about the unique benefits employees value most at some of the region’s top workplaces, how companies are tackling retention and how they’re offering a work-life balance for their employees.

Poettker Construction Company

Large category
100 to 249 employees

What it does
Poettker Construction is a full-service construction management, design-build and general contracting firm.

No. of employees
211

Best Places to Work History
2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018

Annual revenue
$418 million

Top local executive
Ryan Poettker, president

Are you hiring?
Yes, we are hiring. We are searching for experienced superintendents, carpenters, project management professionals, preconstruction and estimating professionals, construction project scheduler, quality managers, safety managers, as well as several internship positions.

What makes your company the best place to work?
Poettker Construction Company is the best place to work because leadership truly believes that fostering strong relationships among coworkers, clients and partners is crucial to our company’s success. The company is a second-generation, family-owned business and promotes a family-oriented culture by supporting employee’s personal, family, professional, and community-related goals.

How does your company promote a work-life balance?
Our technological capabilities support flexibility for employees to work out of various locations, multiple offices and remotely as needed when work or family situations arise. Flexible work schedules have become commonplace. We continue to look for ways to streamline our processes to keep a balanced workload amongst our employees. We host multiple family-oriented events and fun, collaborative activities throughout the year to engage both employees and their family members. Recognizing that travel can be difficult for many of our team members, we began a new travel policy to allow extra time off for traveling employees to spend with their families.

What are you doing to increase retention?
Poettker released a wellness program to encourage our employees to be more proactive with their health and wellness. We support community programs that are important to our employees and their values. Our learning management program assists with our employees’ professional growth and development. We build a strong support system within our company by partnering new employees with a mentor. Our all-around family-oriented culture focuses on ensuring the success of our employees.

What is a unique offering of your workplace?
One of the unique offerings we have at Poettker is the number of events we host throughout the year that include both employees and their family members. We feel that family is number one, always, and do all we can to showcase our appreciation to those who support our employees and our company the most.

How is AI impacting your industry?
Poettker Construction is using AI with job advertisements, career fair postings, and to refresh safety and quality topics with our field employees that may have been repeated or become mundane over the years. AI has been helpful as we create custom messages around unique topics, especially around leadership, human performance, and other soft skills, by drawing comparisons from our industry to others. In the construction industry, we are seeing a push to leverage AI to increase productivity, safety, analytics, and communication, from allowing AI to monitor video streaming to identify safety and quality concerns to a full assessment of company data. As a company, we are dipping our toes into AI and we are seeing others testing the waters as well. We see ourselves and others utilizing AI more and more in the future. However, like everything that is new, we are proceeding with caution to allow ourselves to fully understand the capabilities of the technology.