Healthy, Safe, and High Functioning: Beacon's quest to serve every Alaskan.

• Position: CORPORATE 100 SPECILA SECTION / BEACON

Since Beacon Occupational Health and Safety Services was founded in 1999, the company has operated with three core values: rock star customer service, operational excellence, and have fun. According to Beacon President Holly Hylen, "Part of the 'secret sauce' of a strong company culture is to recruit and hire like-minded folks who share our passion for serving others, being part of the community, and loving and enjoying what they do."

Mark Hylen, Beacon's vice president, agrees. "Really our team helps inspire that culture. Probably the biggest part of our orientation process is around our core values, so we try to inspire the elements of having fun, rock star customer service, and quality excellence at the very beginning, and then it's really the people that embody it."

The Hylens both recognize that Beacon's greatest asset is its employees. Holly states, "I tell people all the time that 95 percent of our assets walk out the door every day, because it's really our team who defines who we are and gets all the credit for the success that Beacon has been able to achieve."

Employee retention is important to the company, and Mark says Beacon has been "blessed with very low employee turnover." Because the company has many employees with a long history, when Beacon is looking for new talent, they value greatly any recommendations their current staff members may supply. "We do recruit through all of the normal channels, but a lot of our best hires come from employee referrals," Holly says. "Our employees understand our culture and our expectations and do a really great job of bringing like-minded folks to the application process."

Another natural result of hiring employee referrals is that Beacon often hires local talent. However, because Beacon offers several lines of service (including remote medical, safety solutions, clinical services, and training options), the company occasionally has to look Outside to fill specific skilled positions, especially those directly involved with healthcare, "Particularly for healthcare, it's become a very tight market," Mark explains. "Although we have a physician assistant program here at the University [of Alaska], you can't place someone out in a remote setting that hasn't had experience with emergency care and expect that person to be able to triage independently."

New employees of every skill level receive some kind of training at Beacon, though what that training entails "varies dramatically because of our...