Employees at , also called CARS, receive automated quarterly emails that inquire about their happiness on the job, how their relationship is with their supervisor and whether they feel like a contributor on a day-to-day basis, among other job-related questions.
“Our employees’ responses help us understand their thoughts regarding their jobs, to see if they feel connected with the company and with one another, and to assure them they are not just a number here,” said Torie Williams, president of CARS. “We are committed to our company’s success as much as we are to their success. If you don’t have a career track here, we help you develop one.”
CARS, a subsidiary of the Virginia-based Chenega MIOS, provides integrated IT support to federal customers globally. Support can include anything from professional services and cloud and infrastructure management to IT service management and mission software systems. The company, which currently employs about 100 workers at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency in St. Louis, was just recognized as a Top Workplace winner in the ֱ’s annual awards program.
The award recognizes organizations that prioritize their employees and create positive work environments. Based on employee feedback, the award is a badge of honor for companies demonstrating a strong culture of employee engagement.
The St. Louis office of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency has been an anchor client of Chenega’s for nearly 25 years. CARS provides the geospatial agency with a workforce that consists of everything from business analysts and engineers to help desk specialists.
“It is through our help desk family that we create opportunities for people looking to enter the IT field including engineers, system administrators, software developers — really, a lot of IT’s service labor force,” Williams said. “If there is a janitor or secretary who has visions of becoming an engineer or software developer, we help make it happen.”
Williams said he himself was a product of that mentoring spirit. Beginning as a system administrator for Chenega MIOS 17 years ago, he rose through the ranks in multiple positions. After serving as director of technical operations, he was approached by management in 2019 to start a new IT subsidiary — CARS, which now employs nearly 200 employees, half of whom work at the geospatial agency in St. Louis.
With AI gaining ground, Williams said, it’s important for companies to continue to foster and mentor new hires and current employees to meet the high-tech demands that are coming.
“Everybody is talking about AI, for example, but in order to have it work efficiently, you have to mature your company’s environment, such as your data. You have to integrate your systems so they can talk to each other and correlate the information,” he said. “You need a highly skilled workforce to do this. We help agencies gain this competitive advantage by assisting them with translating their enterprise data into action.”
Williams said the company’s mission would not be attainable without the support of the CARS employees. Hence the quarterly emails and constant communication to keep them abreast of what’s going on within the industry, as well as new opportunities for them to pursue within it.
CARS even provides free training programs for employees to gain certifications in numerous fields, creating career pathways for them within the company.
“Over the past few years, the job market has changed and new jobs have been introduced that never existed before,” Williams said. “We are helping our employees navigate where their career pathway can be in the next few years because the industry is changing so quickly. Upscaling workforce both now and into the future and creating new jobs for new types of work is just a fact of work life now. For us, recruiting and retention is the No. 1 thing to us because our employees are our future.”
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