Coforma – Success Driven by Valuing Partnership over Transaction and an Investment in PeopleOps

Named once again to the Elev8 GovCon Honorees list, the Coforma team shares a look at what it takes to meet the bar. 

Investment for the Sake of Betterment 

Coforma’s commitment to betterment manifests in several different ways, including direct financial investments that directly help individual employees and teams improve and internal practices that support the betterment of our business operations.  

To support our team’s growth and development, we provide each employee with a $2,000 annual professional development stipend, enabling them to develop new skills and expand their knowledge in areas that align with their work. We also host monthly Brown Bags chats featuring both internal and external presenters who share insights on various topics, such as unconscious bias, supporting neurodiversity in the workplace, leading through complexity, and more.  

Coforma also promotes creativity and collaboration through co:lab, our new internal innovation engine, and co:toast, a program modeled after Toastmasters that helps our PMO team improve their communication skills. Virtual Design Hangs offer opportunities for designers and all Cofolx to share skills and insights, and our Content Design: Fresh Eyes meeting series brings together all disciplines to gain perspective on content design. Our leadership team, accessibility community of practice, and PeopleOps department, and account director teams also offer regular office hours that everyone is encouraged to attend. 

We are committed to creating an inclusive environment where every member of our diverse team feels heard and valued, which means we listen to people to understand how well we’re achieving our goals and then identify areas for improvement. To gather employee feedback and understand sentiments about our culture, processes, and direction, we conduct regular, anonymous, company-wide pulse checks and an in-depth annual culture survey using our internal career development platform. Our PeopleOps team then reviews this information and creates actionable recommendations to improve our workplace culture. PeopleOps also actively solicits employee feedback to ensure our benefits are competitive and meet the diverse needs of our team. Our annual 360 peer review process further facilitates open communication among co-workers, contributing to our ethos of continuous improvement and mutual respect. 

A View on Partnering 

At Coforma, we value partnerships over a transactional approach to consulting. We view every partnership as an investment. We partner with government agencies and other mission-driven organizations committed to making a lasting, positive impact in areas such as healthcare, immigration, Veterans services, voting, access to justice, and civic engagement.  

We adopt a service-minded approach to the work we do. To optimize our collaboration with our partners, we also have to be agile and adaptable. We encourage open communication, inviting partners’ project team members to join our meetings and openly discuss project details. We engage in in-depth conversations, ask questions, solicit feedback, and work diligently together to align with the client’s vision.  

Mutual trust is critical between partners. We both want to know we’ll not only deliver what’s asked, but also have a shared understanding of the challenges, plans, and priorities as well as the transparency to bring our unique insights to the table. This mutual dialogue helps build a collaborative relationship based on sharing expertise.  

Our intake framework serves as an alignment tool that ensures our partnerships are mutually enriching. We want to work with organizations that resonate with our core values of collaboration, accessibility, empowerment, transparency, and ethical responsibility. Collectively, we can address real human needs more effectively than working alone. 

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