Perennial A-Lister Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts works hard at getting its employees involved in the planning process for its meetings, including the biannual global marketing conference, held this past May at the brand-new Four Seasons Hotel Toronto, where the hotel company is headquartered.

public-relations and agency people, and the com- pany’s global sales organization. For this year’s conference, Four Seasons sent

out a pre-event survey “with fairly open-ended questions,” Jones said. “As a collector of data, that makes it difficult. But we wanted to make sure we were really hearing from everyone.” When the surveys came back, the responses to those open- ended questions “absolutely drove the content that we were delivering,” Jones said. The company is currently on the hunt for a new

CEO, and many questions emerged about that change in leadership and how it would affect Four Seasons’ overall direction. “While this was a mar- keting conference, we realized we had to step away from marketing and make sure that our fellow associates were comfortable with our leadership and direction and growth strategy,” Jones said.

“We had to put people at ease that that culture was going to stay intact.” Of course, it’s not always big-picture stuff that

has employees anxious — sometimes it’s more quotidian matters like what’s for breakfast, as

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one of our other Best Companies to Work For discovered a few years ago. “The No. 1 concern at our 2010 conference was that there wasn’t bacon at breakfast,” Camden’s Scharringhausen said proudly. “If every year the only concern is bacon, for $150 I can fix bacon any time of the week.” That might sound like small potatoes (or hash

browns), but employees want to know they’re being listened to. So Camden made sure the next year that there was plenty of pork on the menu, even going so far as to make an inside joke of it by working with the host hotel to get bacon involved in every meal — even dessert.

THEIR MEETINGS MATCH THEIR CULTURE Robert W. Baird & Co. is an employee-owned wealth-management, capital-markets, asset-man- agement, and private-equity firm based in Mil- waukee. Ann Woelfel, CMP, is the company’s vice president and manager of corporate events. When asked whether Baird has an internal “philosophy of meetings,” Woelfel said it doesn’t, because it doesn’t need one — all it needs is its own culture.

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