We’ve gotten our fair share of employer awards over the years, but today’s AdAge Best Places to Work honor stands alone to me, for a few reasons.

First, AdAge is an industry publication I’ve admired since co-founding DMi in 2003. Second, the nature of the award – it’s based on employee survey data and not subject to manipulation or third-party judgment – means that we truly had to provide a great workplace culture to earn the honor. Third, the advertising industry is a competitive and demanding one, so agency standards for engaging their employees and giving them supportive work environments are generally very high.

Add all of these up, and the honor is both extremely rewarding and a great source of motivation for us to reflect on what we’re doing well – in large part to make sure we continue to provide a great environment for all DMiers.

To me, there are three tenets of the DMi environment that contributed most significantly to the award:

Culture over initiatives

Leadership modeling

Consistency

The first, culture over initiatives, means that our general approach to the way we work together is more than the sum of individual initiatives and perks. Things like installing a gym in our office (which we’ve done) to give employees a way to work out just as if they were working from home – those are great, but much more important is the way DMiers authentically celebrate each other’s successes and growth, thanks in part to our rejection of a zero-sum culture. When we do roll out an initiative, we do so because we think it’s the right thing to do and supports the culture we’re trying to build and maintain, not so we can talk about it externally.

The second, leadership modeling, means that our leadership team needs to provide steady examples of the kind of behavior that fosters a strong culture. This starts at the top, with executives who have almost all been with DMi for a decade or more. If we’re secure enough to take pride in our work without needing to take credit for it (or for others’ achievements), and we can speak openly about mistakes or admit when we’ve fallen short, it helps everyone in the company, including more recently hired leaders, understand that politics aren’t necessary and that accountability is more important than perfection.

Without politics in the picture, it’s much easier for a genuine appreciation of each other’s work (which is a big part of DMi’s culture) to flourish.

The third factor, which is a challenge we embrace every day, is consistency. This starts with our company values, which need to reflect behavior, not dictate it. When we sat down as a team to define our company values in 2018, we led with positive behaviors we were already exhibiting instead of listing impressive-sounding words and trying to shoehorn our behavior into them. That felt truer to DMi and makes it easier for us to stay consistent in living our values, whether it’s incorporating them into performance reviews or celebrating great examples of employees living our values in our weekly company shout-outs.

Our approach to building culture has led to relatively good stability (many of our employees have been with us for a decade or more), which is a big part of our consistency. That said, to hold ourselves to the standard of being great employers, we need to strive every day to invest in people’s skill development, solicit and act on feedback for how to improve our workplace, and put people in positions to grow and succeed.

One of my favorite DMi values is “Wanting to Win,” and this AdAge honor is certainly a point of pride to our very competitive team. That said, I believe it’s another of our values, “Do the Right Thing,” that serves as a blueprint for how to approach our culture. This badge represents a lot of things—perhaps most importantly the bar that we need to continue to raise to attract and retain great people.