By Rory Olson, CEO, MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions 

This year, the Puget Sound Business Journal named MacDonald-Miller Facility Solutions the second-best place to work in Washington in the extra-large company category. We finished third in 2022, first in 2025, and second this year. 

I don’t take that lightly. This isn’t an award decided by a panel or won with a good pitch. It comes from employee surveys, completed by our own people, measuring things like leadership, benefits, and whether folks actually feel good about where they work. When our team tells an independent surveyor that this is a place worth being, again and again, that tells me something real is happening here. 

I think about these results the way I think about any leading indicator. We track pipeline health and safety metrics because they tell us where the business is headed before the results ever show up on a balance sheet. Employee engagement works the same way. A team that feels heard and invested in shows up differently, and that shows up in retention, in referrals, and in the quality of the work we deliver. 

That’s not separate from how we treat customers. It’s the same thing. Our people don’t leave their standards at the door when they walk onto a job site. If they feel respected and invested in here, they show up for our customers the same way. Culture and customer experience aren’t two different things. They’re the same muscle. 

A technician who feels supported troubleshoots a system with the same care whether anyone’s watching. A project manager who trusts their team passes that trust on to the general contractor. Culture isn’t the backdrop to customer experience. It’s the source of it. 

I’m proud of where we’ve landed on this list, and even more proud of what it says about how we treat each other and how we show up for the people we serve.