Turning Consistency Into Legacy

By Luke Carothers 

There are award winners, and then there are firms that redefine what winning looks like.  For Garver, that line has been crossed and redrawn entirely.  Year after year, the firm has appeared on the Best Firms to Work For List.  Not as a one-time standout, but as a constant. 

At a certain point, consistency like that stops fitting inside the category meant to measure it.  The standard must shift, and, when it does, recognition has to catch up.  The BFTWF Legacy category was created to recognize what happens when excellence endures. 

This Was Never About the Award 

Inside Garver, the recognition was never treated as the goal, but rather as the signal.  It reflected something deeper that existed long before the awards and continues regardless of them.  For Laura Nick, Garver’s Chief Communications Officer, “it’s always been about the employees,” which shows up in the way the firm makes decisions. 

Garver’s commitment to their employees isn’t something that shows up in broad statements, but rather in consistent action through things like how benefits are structured, how people are supported, and how the day-to-day experience is shaped across the firm. 

Over time, as Nicks puts it, that commitment became their “differentiator,” providing the storied firm with a defining edge.  Awards like Best Firms to Work For soon followed, and they kept coming. 

Making Culture Visible 

When Laura Nick stepped into her role at Garver, it wasn’t to build a culture where one didn’t exist.  Rather, she viewed her task as revealing one that was already there.  The firm already had a solid foundation including strong benefits, a real commitment to wellness, and a long-standing focus on taking care of employees.  Long before culture became a buzzword, Garver was putting these ideas into practice. 

For Nick, there was clear substance, but a lack of visibility.  This made her work clear.  Communicate, reinforce, and make sure employees recognized it as much as the outside world did.  Once that shift happened, something else followed: clarity.  Soon, with their culture becoming more visible, it began to do more than support the business.  It began to shape it. 

A System That Listens 

What separates strong culture from sustained culture is discipline rather than intention or messaging, and systems to support this.  For Garver, this system was a simple commitment.  Listen, and then do something about it.  This commitment was supported by infrastructure like Zweig Group’s Employee Experience Survey.  Nick says that such structures allow them to take feedback and “implement it effectively.” 

This is where the difference has shown for Garver, leading the firm to do things like expand their benefits and offer stronger wellness programs among other adjustments that reflect what employees are experiencing and not what leadership assumes. 

This sort of structure doesn’t entail any sort of reset or reinvention.  It only requires continuous alignment between what people say and what the firm does. 

Designed to Stay Connected 

For AEC firms, growth creates distance—more people, more offices, more complexity.  What comes with it, however, is a quieter risk.  The slow drift away from connection.  Garver doesn’t leave this risk to chance.  Instead, they designed against it. 

Nick notes, “as we grow, it’s harder to feel small, so we’ve had to be intentional about it.”  That intention shows in how their leadership engages.  Leaders show up in person and conversations happen face to face.  However, these efforts are not to recreate a smaller company, but rather to preserve what made it work in the first place. 

In this view, connection isn’t a byproduct of culture.  It’s how culture holds together as everything else expands. 

A Rhythm People Feel 

Connection doesn’t sustain itself on intention alone, however.  Connection requires consistency.  It requires something they experience regularly enough that it becomes part of how the organization feels day to day. 

At Garver, that consistency shows up in the rhythm of communication.  This doesn’t just come with major announcements, but in the steady flow of everyday updates that keep people connected to the broader organization.  During the pandemic, when connection was most at risk, the firm did things like introduce a daily podcast.  While simple in format, it was effective in practice.  It became a way to share what was happening across the company: project wins, employee milestones, and small moments that would otherwise go unseen. 

What started as a response soon turned into the standard because, over time, consistency is more than information.  Consistency reinforces connection in a way that feels natural, not forced. 

Celebration, Done Intentionally 

For most firms, recognition is an outcome, but for Garver, it’s practice.  The difference shows how the moment is handled.  Winning isn’t treated as a line item or a press release.  It’s something the organization leans into. 

That celebration takes shape in ways that are hard to ignore—annual themes, internal campaigns, and traditions that evolve year to year while staying recognizable.  This turns static recognition into something employees can participate in. And that participation matters because it shifts the meaning of the award.  It’s not something the firm receives.  It’s something everyone experiences together. 

Over time, these moments accumulate.  They because more than isolated celebrations and start reinforcing the culture, allowing it to become visible in a way that lasts well beyond the announcement. 

When Consistency Becomes the Standard 

There’s a point where repetition stops being the story and starts becoming the expectation.  For Garver, that shift didn’t happen all at once.  It was built over time.  It was built year after year by showing up in the same place, driven by the same underlying focus on people and employee experience.  What might begin as a streak eventually becomes something much more durable.  It becomes a pattern that holds. 

And when that pattern holds long enough, it changes how success is viewed.  It becomes the reference point others are measured against. 

That’s what the legacy category represents.  Not an extension of the award, but a recognition that sustained excellence at this level requires a different lens. 

At that point, it’s no longer about staying at the top.  It’s about defining what it takes to get there. 

Ready to start your own streak?  Take Zweig Group’s Employee Experience Survey today and benchmark your firm’s culture against your peers. 

source https://zweiglist.com/turning-consistency-into-legacy/